Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan 9780822382591

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Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

Modernism and the Nativist Resistance Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan Duke University Press Durham & London 1993

© 1993 Duke University Press All rights reserved Typeset in Joanna by Tseng Information Systems. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

00

Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

Preface

vii

ONE

Introduction

TWO

The Rise of the Modernist Trend

23

THREE

Appropriations of Literary Modernism

5°

FOUR

Modernists Reaching Maturity: Cultural Critique and Textual Strategies

88

FIVE

The Nativist Resistance to Modernism

148

SIX

Conclusion: Entering a New Era

177

Notes

18 9

Select Bibliography

2°9

Sources of English Translations of Literary Works from Taiwan

223

Glossary

227

Index

239

Preface

The Hsien-tai wen-hsiieh yiin-tung (Modernist literary movement) of Taiwan's post-1949 era represents one of three extensive efforts made by Chinese writers at active appropriation of Western literary modernism. 1 Just as China's first modernist trend of the 1930S was interrupted by the SinoJapanese War and virtually discontinued by the Communist Revolution, the recent surge of interest in modernism and postmodernism among writers in the People's Republic ofChina has also markedly declined since the T'ienan-men Incident in 1989. Taiwan's Modernist literary movement, therefore, has had the greatest longevity of the three, and it may also claim the most impressive artistic output. Since the mid- 1980s, the richly intricate implications of a "Chinese modernism" have generated much interest among scholars inside and outside China. The historical disconnectedness of the three waves of Chinese modernism, however, poses certain difficulties for theorizing attempts. Although resonances between the Chinese modernist art and literature of the thirties and the eighties undoubtedly exist, direct connections are hard to find because of the intervention of half a century's officially enforced "socialist realism." There are, however, immediately traceable links between the first two waves ofChinese modernist literature, for some ofthe modernists ofthe thirties moved to Taiwan with the Nationalist government around 1949 and played crucial roles in initiating the Modernist literary trend there. A comparative study ofthe latter two movements also promises interesting results, as both are still viable artistic currents and mutual interactions are

viii Preface

inevitable, given the increasing contacts between writers from Taiwan and the People's Republic. Although Modernist fiction in Taiwan bears unmistakable" imprints of China's pre-Revolution periods, it must also be considered a product of the unique historical reality of Taiwan over the last forty years. The present study, treating the subject from both the Chinese and the Taiwanese perspectives, is, above all, a scholarly examination of the complex phenomenon of the proliferation of literary modernism in a non-Western context. For, in a serious sense, Taiwan's Modernist literary movement in the 1960s and the virulent Nativist resistance to it in the 1970S are exemplary ofworld literary history in the twentieth century, a significant component of which is the global spread of Western social and cultural values along with the expansion of capitalism. Several ofthe Modernist writers discussed in this book have been my longtime mentors and good friends. Although I have constantly tried to reassess Taiwan's Modernist literary movement in terms of new theoretical perspectives, I am convinced of the worth of these writers' endeavors and share certain values endorsed in this movement-values that have sustained changes in public opinion and shifting intellectual trends. Writing this book in English is part of an ongoing, collective effort to place contemporary Taiwan's fine literary product on the map of twentieth-century world literature. This larger task could never have been accomplished without the pioneering work ofsuch outstanding scholars as C. T. Hsia, Joseph Lau, Leo Lee, and Howard Goldblatt, who have contributed not only critical writings but also translations and editorial work. To them my study is heavily indebted. In particular, if I had not been asked to write on Taiwan's literature for two special issues of Modern Chinese Literature in 1984 and 1988, I would have continued my research on medieval Chinese poetry, the subject of my doctoral work. As I am now convinced that my work in contemporary Chinese literature meets a more urgent demand, I am especially grateful to the journal's founder and general editor, Howard Goldblatt, for bringing me into the field. The unreserved confidence that Reynolds Smith at Duke University Press has shown in this project is heartily appreciated. The Asian Collection of the University of Texas General Library and the unfailing help of its direc-

ix Preface

tor, Kevin Lin, were also indispensable for the completion ofthis work. The Pacific Cultural Foundation of the Republic of China supported the final stage ofmy work on the manuscript with a writing grant in addition to providing a publication subsidy. I would also like to express my gratitude to my friend and colleague Jeannette Faurot, who had to shoulder extra teaching and administrative responSibilities while I took a research leave between 1989 and 1990. Finally, the inexhaustible patience and high-spirited support from my husband Fred Wang and our son Eric have made the process of writing this book a truly memorable experience in my family life. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of passages from the Chinese originals are my own.

Dates of Major Authors Ch'en Ying-chen (b. 1936) Ch'i-chiin (b. 1917) Ch'i-teng Sheng (b. 1939) Chu Hsi-ning (b. 1926) Li Ang (b. 1952) Li Yung-p'ing (b. 1947) Lin Hai-yin (b. 1919) Huang Ch'un-ming (b. 1939) Ou-yang Tzu (b. 1939) Pai Hsien-yung (b. 1937) P'anJen-mu (b. 1920) Wang Chen-ho (1940-1990) Wang Wen-hsing (b. 1939)

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The death of President Chiang Ching-kuo of the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1988 marked the end of an era in postwar Taiwan. This era began in 1949, when China's Nationalist government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, retreated from the mainland to settle on the offshore island-province of Taiwan after being defeated by the Communists in the civil war. The forty-year period under the autocratic rule of two presidents from the Chiang family was characterized by remarkable continuity and homogeneity in the social, political, and cultural spheres. Drastic structural changes, however, began occurring at all levels ofthe society in the mid-198os following momentous political changes initiated by Chiang Ching-kuo during his last two yearsthe lifting ofmartial law, the recognition ofan opposition party, the removal of the ban on founding new newspapers, and the resumption of communication with mainland China at the civilian level. New intellectual and artistic currents have emerged, many with the explicit or implicit motive of reexamining existing orders. The present moment, therefore, offers an ideal opportunity to reassess the literary accomplishments of writers from Taiwan in the forty-year period as an integral historical unit. With China split into two political entities with different sociopolitical systems since 1949, the tradition of the Chinese New Literature (Hsin wen-hsiieh) has also been traveling along divergent paths in the two Chinese societies.1 On the one hand, writers in post-1949 Taiwan have been selective in developing their literary heritage; whereas revolutionary literature and "critical realism" were suppressed, the more inoffensive, lyrical-

2 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

sentimental strand of New Literature has enjoyed great popularity. On the other hand, from the anti-Communist propaganda of the cold war decade of the 1950s, through the Modernist and Nativist literary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to the expression of today's pluralism and burgeoning market-oriented mass culture, literary currents in post-1949 Taiwan have closely mirrored the country's larger sociopolitical transitions. The elitist, Western-influenced Modernist literary movement of the sixties and the populist, nationalistic Hsiang-t'u wen-hsiieh yiin-tung (Nativist literary movement) of the seventies may appropriately be regarded as "alternative" and "oppositional" cultural formations in Taiwan during this period, using terminology from Raymond Williams (112-114). As the Modernists adopted literary concepts developed in Western capitalist society, they simultaneously longed for an ideological transformation, taking such bourgeois social values as individualism, liberalism, and rationalism as correctives for the oppressive social relations derived from a traditional system of values. The inherent skepticism of the Modernists toward the dominant culture's neotraditionalist discourse, acted on fully in the later phase ofthe movement, was beyond any doubt potentially subversive. The Nativist literary movement, in contrast, with its use of literature as a·pretext to challenge the dominant sociopolitical order, may be properly considered counterhegemonic. The movement was triggered by the nation's diplomatic setbacks in the international arena during the 1970s. It provided a forum for native Taiwanese intellectuals to vent their discontent with the unbalanced political power distribution between mainlanders and native Taiwanese and with the socioeconomic problems that had accompanied the country's accelerated process of industrialization since the 1960s. The pronounced oppositional nature of this movement is evident in all three of its proclaimed goals: to destroy the political myth of the mainlandercontrolled Nationalist government, to denounce bourgeois capitalist social values, and to combat Western cultural imperialism, which was thought to be exemplified by the Modernist literary movement. For different reasons, each movement dominated Taiwan's literary scene only for a relatively brief period of time. By the late 1970S and early 1980s, the influence ofboth the Modernists and the Nativists had sharply declined, and some of their inherent shortcomings had become obvious with the passage of time. As most of the Modernist writers advocated artistic au-

3 Introduction

tonomy and were politically disengaged, the subversive elements of their works were easily coopted by hegemonic cultural forces and their critical impact consequently diluted. The more radical subscription to aestheticism by certain writers, moreover, was deeply at odds with the predominantly lyrical senSibility ofordinary Chinese readers. Even though the essential dynamics of the Modernist movement were not entirely exhausted with the loss of popular favor, both critics and general readers received the movement's most mature output in the 1980s with a disheartening nonchalance. In the meantime, the militant political agenda of the Nativists both threatened and bored middle-class readers, who were largely satisfied with the status quo. The resistant activities of the more radical Nativists, moreover, were increaSingly channeled into direct political involvement. The subsiding of these contending literary voices thus paved the way for the rise of a "serious" literature more popular in nature and a resurgence of the lyrical and sentimental strain in the eighties. The younger generation ofwriters of this decade assimilated the technical sophistication of the Modernists and displayed a social awareness as a result ofthe Nativist influence. Their vocational visions, however, significantly departed from those of their mentors and were much more deeply conditioned by the market logic of Taiwan's increaSingly commercialized cultural setting. Critical discourse on Taiwan's literature of the last two decades has been deeply factional, and studies of Modernist writers, many of whom were heavily stigmatized in the overheated literary disputes of the 1970s, have been particularly scanty. In the United States, since C. T. Hsia observed in the preface to his A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1971, second edition) that "Taiwan since 1961 has enjoyed a minor literary renascence ofgenuine promise, even though few Western readers are yet aware of its existence" (vii), scores ofserious critical essays have been written about this literary phenomenon, and a collection of articles on Tai'wan fiction, which included some seminal studies ofthe Modernists, was published in 1980 (Faurot). Nevertheless, no substantial scholarly treatment of the Modernist literary movement that covers both the early and late phases of its development has appeared in Chinese or English. The present study, intended to fill this gap, examines this movement from several different perspectives. Chapters in this book separately treat the following subjects: the artistic reorientation of the Modernist writers that sig-

4 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

nificantly distinguished their work from older forms of modern Chinese literature, represented in Taiwan by an older generation ofwriters active in the 1950S; the various ways in which the Modernists appropriated Western literary modernism; cultural criticism and textual strategies found in works of the mature stage of the movement; and, finally, the contesting voices of the Nativist critics in reaction to the Modernist project. Western literary influences on Chinese writers and transformations of various literary "-isms" in Chinese hands have been favorite subjects ofstudy in the field of twentieth-century Chinese literature. By arguing in this book that certain literary practices in Taiwan during the Modernist literary movement may be defined, in a specially qualified sense, as "modernist," I hope to engage in dialogues with scholars ofChinese modernist trends who confront similar issues of literary history.

The Modernist Literary Movement The event commonly considered as having inaugurated the modernist trend in Taiwan's fiction was the publication ofthe literary magazine Hsien-tai wenhsiieh [Modern literature] (1960-1973; 1976-), founded by a group of young writers who were at the time still undergraduate students in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. In addition to creative work by Chinese writers, the magazine also published translations of creative and critical works from the Western modernist canon, featuring such writers as Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and D. H. Lawrence. Initially, the magazine served only as a creative writing workshop for a score of precocious, talented students of Western literature, whose artistic vision closely reflected that of their dearly respected mentor, Professor T. A. Hsia. Soon, however, it turned into a reputable center for literature loosely defined as "modernist," and, in the next two decades, the outstanding achievements of its founding members lent it even greater prestige.2 In the preface to an anthology of works selected from the magazine, Pai Hsien-yung could proudly claim that the collection included work by nearly all of Taiwan's promising writers active during the thirteen years when Modern Literature was published (Ou-yang, Hsien-tai 15-17). Although not all ofthe successive editors of Modern Literature, who included

5 Introduction

several established writers and students of traditional Chinese literature, necessarily shared the vision ofthe magazine's founders, the editorial policy ofthe magazine was clearly to introduce new modes ofart distinct from the prevailing ones. Deserving of particular attention is the justification offered for this undertaking in the foreword to the first issue ofthe magazine, which serves as a de facto manifesto ofthe Modernists: "We feel that old forms and old styles are insufficient in expressing the artistic sentiments of modern people" (Lau, Foreword 2). The presumption ofthe statement, that there is a necessary correlation between the artistic form and the episteme of a particular historical moment, is reminiscent of claims made by Western modernists, especially British ones, in the early part of the century, explaining their literature as a radical break from the past. Although one cannot be certain that Taiwan's Modernists indeed share the belief of many Western modernists that a rupture in human history in the modern age severed them from the entire past of human civilization, themes and techniques developed in response to the societal modernization of the last two hundred years-mainly in the West-have appeared repeatedly in their writings. Although these appropriations may have assisted certain Taiwan writers in coping with the onslaught of capitalism in their own society, nevertheless a considerable disparity exists between this Chinese version of modernist literature and its Western models. This disparity is a result of profound differences in historical and cultural preconditions between the West since the mid-nineteenth century and Taiwan during the 1950S and 1960s. Scholars and critics of post-1949 Taiwan literature have fervently debated the adequacy of such a term as "Chinese modernism." Those sensitive to the derivative, imitative nature ofTaiwan's Modernist literature have argued that the superficial modernist traits ofmost ofthis literature are not intrinsically motivated. Lacking the animating spirit ofmodernism that underlies its Western models, it "becomes ultimately more form than content, more stylistic and technical showmanship than a doctrine ofprofound philosophical implications" (Lee, "Modernism" 20). Underneath the modernist surface are thematic concerns ofa very local nature or even feigned, unauthentic sentiments. In sum, the implied criticism is that the Modernists' appropriations of Western modernism only occurred at the linguistic and stylistiC levels, with the cultural and historical content largely displaced.

6 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

The more negative critics, mainly from the Nativist camp, displaying a bias against modernism similar to that of Georg Lukacs, dismissed literary technique as something superfluous in itself, a formal diversion that prevents writers from engagement with truly important contemporary issues. Motivated by both socialist and nationalist ideas, these critics were primarily concerned with preventing Western capitalism from taking root in Taiwan, and they regarded the Modernists as heralding precisely that process. Thus they have emotionally castigated the Modernists for haVing voluntarily imposed on themselves, out of vanity, such spiritual disease as the alienation syndrome, existentialist despair, and nihilistic moral depraVity-all symptoms ofthe malaise ofcapitalist societies not yet endemic in Taiwan. As the Nativist critic Yli T'ien-ts'ung humorously put it, the Modernists have just "sneezed at seeing someone else catching a cold." Although these arguments contain valid points to receive attention in due course, both views are strongly evaluative, reflecting the Chinese critics' sense of anxiety about the movement's implication of a master-slave relationship between the Western and the Chinese. In fact, this anxiety is rooted in precisely the same external conditions that motivated the Modernists to adopt Western models; holders ofthese views come mostly from the same generation as the Modernists. The present study, from the vantage point of a later historical moment, intends to point out, however, that the question of whether Chinese Modernist literature is "genuine" or "fake," or whether it renders a perfect simulacrum of literary modernism in the West half a century earlier is insignificant. What really matters and makes the movement worth studying is that the modernist influences have in fact produced significant consequences in Chinese literature and culture from a national perspective. The significance of Taiwan's Modernist literary movement, therefore, deserves assessment primarily in terms of its generation of new dynamiCS among contemporary Chinese writers and its redirecting of their artistic mode of expression. Such an assessment is the task undertaken in the central chapters of the book. The present chapter examines the cultural and intellectual context of this movement along two lines of inquiry. First, the Modernist literary movement is seen as another instance of the larger project of Chinese intellectuals' emulation of Western high culture. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, shocked by the devastating

7 Introduction

effect of China's encounter with hegemonic Western culture, modern Chinese intellectuals have embarked on various programs ofcultural rejuvenation, the most potent formula for which consists in assimilation of Western cultural products. Taiwan's Modernist literary movement, as one ofthe latest in a series of such programs, inevitably displays some of its essential characteristics. Second, an important link is perceived between this movement and the liberal strand of thought in China's pre-Revolution era, especially that ofthe Anglo-American wing ofintellectuals.3 Taiwan's Modernists particularly stressed the prinCiple ofartistic autonomy, among other liberal conceptions of literature, and, by and large, have more thoroughly adhered to this prinCiple than their pre-1949 liberal predecessors.

An Elitist Program for Cultural Rejuvenation

Scholars have often attributed the unusually strong influence ofWestern literature on Taiwan writers of the post- 1949 era to the inaccessibility of the literary heritage of their own immediate predecessors. According to this argument, the banning of works by most pre-1949 New Literature writers created a vacuum that forced young writers in Taiwan to turn to foreign sources for literary inspiration. The more political interpreters of this phenomenon, however, have stressed the effect of the ubiquitous workings of cultural imperialism, contending that the prominent American presence in post- 1949 Taiwan necessarily fostered excessive zeal for American cultural products. While the arbitrarily created breach in modern Chinese literary history is regrettable, placing too much weight on the apparent discontinuity between literature in Taiwan and pre-1949 traditions sometimes unduly lures our attention away from certain consistencies in Chinese intellectual attitudes toward the West in both the pre- and post-1949 eras. Despite the different strategies adopted, similar patterns are discerned in the way Chinese intellectuals from different periods cope with their ambivalent feelings about hegemonic Western culture. The way founding members of Modern Literature perceive and justify their pro-Western position, for example, draws its strength from the persistently recurring hsi-hua (Westernization) discourse.4 The specific logiC ofthe Westernization discourse entails an acknowledgment of the wretched condition of contemporary Chinese affairs and an

8 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

enlightened acceptance or active assimilation of positive features of Western civilization for the ultimate purpose of self-rejuvenation. Thus, in the foreword to Modern Literature's inaugural issue, Joseph Lau says that the editors do not want to deceive themselves by taking pride in China's past glory but instead would "face our own backwardness" (2). In assuming a self-critical stance, Lau goes on to declare that "the territory of the New Literature is desolate, if not entirely barren" (2). In a later issue, Wang Wen-hsing also claimed that the dissatisfaction with the current decline ofart had motivated the young college students to devote their energy and time to the prospect of a "Chinese Renaissance" ("Hsien-tai" 4). Editors ofModern Literature apparently conceived their efforts at invigorating modern Chinese literature with a liberal vision. Lau states in the same foreword that he and his colleagues would pursue their causes with "sobriety, wisdom, receptiveness, and modesty." Even Wang's more iconoclastic editorial note aims ultimately to beseech an attitudinal change among the conservatives. With a sprightly analogy, Wang compares in this note the potential opponents ofthe Modernists to tyrannical fathers who forbid their offspring to play ball, sing songs, ride bicycles, and listen to the radio-simply because these activities are all "Western" ("Hsien-tai" 6). The seemingly radical assertion of the supremacy of Western civilization in modern life is, after all, intended to elicit open-mindedness. Such determined liberal efforts to maintain a receptive attitude eased the tension of the East-West confrontation somewhat and thus made the particular version of Taiwan's Westernization program less painful than some earlier ones. The Modernists, for instance, have been comparatively free of the sense of guilt and self-denial that tormented some advocates of Westernization in the May Fourth period.5 As latecomers, they seem to have accepted the necessity ofWesternization as a premise and to have perceived their own mission to be realizing its goals with dedication and intelligence. The surge ofthe Westernization discourse is always motivated by speCific historical circumstances. The 1960s in Taiwan in many ways resembled the 1980s in the People's Republic of China, when dynamic interactions with Western countries were endorsed by the government and the effects were visible at all levels of the society. For the intellectuals, closer communication with the West not only increased their knowledge of current Western thought but also incited an earnest desire to catch up with what was hap-

9

Introduction

pening in the rest of the world. That literary modernism came to signify the latest, most advanced artistic development in the world, the "mainstream," was a direct consequence of its recent canonization in Western academia and an effect of the growing global influence of the West in the postwar years. As Western cultural products masqueraded under the guise ofcosmopolitanism, the illusion that national boundaries might be in some sense obliterated was reinforced by the conception of the universal existence ofa "modern condition." The vision ofan artistic community in which absolute artistic criteria apply to everyone of its members regardless of nationality was particularly appealing to young Chinese writers in Taiwan, who could not but be keenly aware of the backwardness of the cultural conditions in their own country and of Taiwan's peripheral status in the international scene.6 The function ofmodernist literature as a potent sign ofprogressiveness in Taiwan was a phenomenon shared with many other Asian countries in the postwar years. At the same time, aspiration for membership in the international elite frequently implied latent nationalistic motives, as the individual's artistic accomplishment would presumably also bring glory to his or her people. For these reasons Taiwan's Modernist literature departed from its Western counterpart in certain aspects. Most notably, seeing themselves as intellectuals in a developing country, Modernist writers in Taiwan typically did not share, except in a perfunctory sense, the disparaging view of modernity of twentieth-century Western modernists. Even in their bleakest moments, they never expressed such profound discontent with human civilization as Lionel Trilling described in his famous essay "On the Modern Element in Modern Literature." 7 Rather than participating in the modernist program of "cultural negation," these Chinese intellectuals often displayed unreserved confidence in the positivistic vision of Mauhew Arnold, which, ironically, has been cited by Trilling as demonstrating a spirit categorically rebuked by Western modernists in this century. Arnold's optimistic view of modern culture as one that "Signifies certain timeless intellectual and civil virtues" found many subscribers in Taiwan, such as the most influential critic-scholar ofthe 196os, Yen Yuan-shu (Trilling 70).8 In fact, the majority of Taiwan's postwar-generation intellectuals actively supported the country's modernization through technological advancement, regarding this process as indispensable for improving the cultural environment. The project of

10 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

modernity as they conceived it may be very similar to what was described by }iirgen Habermas in the following words: "The project ofmodernity formulated in the 18th century by the philosophers ofthe Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic.... The Enlightenment philosophers wanted to utilize this accumulation of specialized culture for the enrichment of everyday life-that is to say, for the rational organization of everyday social life" (9). Although such ideals were extremely enticing for Taiwan's most Westernized postwar generation, they at times became dangerously deceiving. In Wang Wen-hsing's soul-searching novel Chia-pien [Family crisis] (1973), for instance, the visionary projection of a rationalized modern society characterized by "the ideal of order, convenience, decorum, and rationality" is in fact the basis for the hero's unjustifiably harsh criticism of the traditional Chinese family system. The young hero's fanatic beliefthat this utopian human relationship has already been realized in the "genuinely civilized" European societies of the nineteenth century, based on a crude understanding of some novel he has read, is apparently naive. Yet such an extremist position is a product of unexamined assumptions and prevailing myths about Western civilization unconsciously endorsed by many intellectuals in Taiwan. Elitist Western modernist literature has performed another important function for Chinese intellectuals because of its potential to become a substitute for the aristocratic high art in classical Chinese tradition. In contrast to writers in many other parts of the third world, whose fetishization of a "national culture" reflects an intense fear of its doomed lot oferasure from history, modern Chinese intellectuals often suffer from a different kind of psychological complex, one deriving from an inflated cultural identity. Yet classical literary education in post- 1949 Taiwan cannot be said to be ofa very high quality. The euphoric rhetoric of the government's wen-hua fu-hsing (cultural renaissance) program, moreover, frequently performs a disservice to traditional Chinese culture by creating pretentious, kitsch images of it. Nevertheless, for contemporary Chinese intellectuals, the desire to live up to China's past glory proves to be a common psychological need, even though the ways in which the Modernists attempted to achieve this goal were very different from the methods ofthe traditionalists. With their superior stylistic sensibility, the Modernists were unWilling

11

Introduction

to deceive themselves about the viability of traditional literary forms in a modern setting. Most ofthese traditional forms carry with them distinctive characteristics oftheir gentry class origins, which no longer find justification at the present moment ofhistory. Even though the traditional literary style is still being practiced and is still appealing to certain readers, its lyrical refinement has degenerated with popular use. The worn-out poetic diction, often used as mere embellishment, coupled with May Fourth sentimentalism resulted in a florid but exceedingly anemic prose style. Literary modernism's vigorous demand for complexity and refinement in structure and language, in contrast, promised to meet the serious writers' need for a "new artistic idiom" in their attempt to create a modern Chinese "high art." Despite their drastically different ideological content, modernist Western and classical Chinese literatures have certain affinities in terms of their aesthetic outlook. Some of Taiwan's Modernists, at least in their maturity, have been increasingly inclined to stress such points of convergence. The most obvious examples are such famous poets as Yii Kuang-chung and Yang Mu. As far as fiction writers are concerned, Pai Hsien-yung is an eminent example. Aside from the traditionalist view of history and culture found in his Taipei jen [Tales of Taipei characters] (1971), his latest novel, Nieh-tzu [Crystal boys] (1983), directly incorporates symbolism and worldview from his favorite classical novel, Hung-lou meng [Dream ofthe red chamber].9 Wang Wen-hsing, too, has invoked concepts of classical Chinese poetic and ethical traditions to justify theoretically his Herculean project of language experimentation. His own style in "Wu-sheng yin-hsiang" [Impressions offive Chinese provinces] (1990) is vividly reminiscent of classical lyrical prose. Both writers, furthermore, have displayed exquisite connoisseurship oftraditional genres of art and literature, such as k'un-ch'u, the classic novel, and the lyrical prose ofthe late Ming Kung-an and Ching-ling schools. Therefore, although the strategy of the Westernized Modernists in dealing with the indigenous Chinese tradition consisted initially of ostensible self-criticism and self-denial, it is nevertheless underscored with an utopian ideal of synthesis, of eventually combining the "best" of both the Chinese and the Western traditions. It is true that, in practice, before the movement entered its more mature stage, the bulk of Taiwan's Modernist works were only "modernist" in a superficial sense, in which "the outer mannerisms and traits ofthe modern

12 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

are faithfully echoed or mimicked but the animating spirit has disappeared," to borrow from Irving Howe (22). Nevertheless, the intellectual orientation ofthe Modernist project has led Taiwan writers to terrain unknown to their Chinese predecessors, thus creating significant mutations in the thematic conventions of modern Chinese narrative. If, as expressed by the frequently cited epithet of C. T. Hsia, the moral burden of modern Chinese writers (mainly referring to writers of the pre1949 period) consists in their excessive "obsession with China," concerns with national destiny have played a much less significant role in writings of Taiwan's Modernists. Instead, the majority of the Modernists have been inordinately obsessed with "depth," as manifested in their preoccupation with psychological exploration, their fascination with the uncanny, and their general predilection for expressing the "truth" through symbolic methods. These writers have frequently ventured into forbidden zones, dealing with themes ofsexuality, incest, and guilt; and they are undoubtedly at their best when grappling with such morally compelling issues as the ethical responsibility of the individual, fate, and the meaning of human suffering. This philosophical inclination is espeCially noteworthy for its departure from the largely pragmatiC tendencies in traditional Chinese narrative as well as for its having compensated-or perhaps overcompensated-for the lopSided sociopolitical emphasis ofpre-1949 modern Chinese fiction.

Artistic Autonomy and Liberal Ideals The Modernists writers have been widely recognized-and have even received compliments from their opponents-for the refinement of their literary techniques. This accomplishment, in a sense, is a direct consequence of the Modernists' adherence to the prinCiple of artistic autonomy. In particular, the belief in the autonomous status of art, in the intrinsic value of literary work independent ofsocial use, has enabled the Modernists to effectively resist pressures to write according to political and moral prescriptions, pressures that, as scholars have repeatedly pointed out, constituted the most formidable hindrance to modern Chinese writers' cultivation ofartistry. As a result, Taiwan's Modernist writers procured for themselves space for unconstrained artistic imagination almost unprecedented in modern Chinese

13

Introduction

history. On this account alone, the movement has implications reaching beyond its immediate context ofpost-1949 Taiwan history. The way in which the Modernists conceived the notion of artistic autonomy and the various aesthetic principles ensuing from it is unquestionably derived from Western models. The American New Critics' formulations ofsuch doctrines in particular have played crucial roles in shaping the literary outlook of Taiwan's Modernists, as several ofthem studied in American graduate schools during the 1960s. Here, rather than postulating their essentially formalist conceptions of literature, I will concentrate on unraveling some of their basic ideological assumptions. The Modernists' belief in literature's nonutilitarian character and its possession of "intrinsic" rules and values may be seen as derived from Enlightenment rationalism, from the notion that aesthetics, constituting a distinct sphere ofexperience, must be allowed to develop according to its own inner logiC. Despite the Nativists' disparagement ofthe Modernists' artistic view as decadent and escapist, evidence shows that the attraction of Western modernism for Taiwan's Modernists goes beyond the "art for art's sake" tenet and rests much deeper in its ideological assumptions. More speCifically, the Modernists have perceived exceptional worth in the ideology precisely because of its promise to help them redress their own cultural deficiencies. In his essay "Modernity-an Incomplete Project," Jiirgen Habermas says that Max Weber "characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphYSiCS into three autonomous spheres," namely, science, morality, and art (9). The differentiation of these three distinct spheres, he continues, was a result ofthe disintegration of the unified worldviews of religion and metaphYSiCS (9). Given the indisputable differences between Chinese and Western varieties of metaphysics, one may nonetheless argue that in the course of industrialization and modernization in Chinese society, a process similar to that of the collapse of religion in the West has occurred, which may be summed up, in an overSimplified manner, as the disintegration ofneo-Confucianist moralism and the terms of interpersonal relationships stipulated according to the model offamily hierarchy. With a common theme offather-son conflict, two ofTaiwan's Modernists' most significant novels, Pai Hsien-yung's Crystal Boys and Wang Wen-hsing's Family Crisis-both of which will be discussed in greater

14 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

detail in Chapter 4-have provided powerful testimony to the horrendous effect of this process on the individual conscience. By offering bitter protests against the traditional ethical norms that are crystallized in the Confucianist notions of chung (loyalty) and hsiao (filial piety), these two novels have called into question fundamental underpinnings of the superstructure of contemporary Taiwan society. Notably, in both works, the battle against the social retention of traditional values is waged with the aid of Western conceptual frames. Family Crisis features as its central theme the conflict of bourgeOiS individualism with the concept of filial piety in a finanCially strapped modern Chinese family. That the hero is portrayed as a fanatic rationalist shows the degree to which the author is skeptical of the real efficacy of such an ideological transfer. Crystal Boys projects a more idealistic vision that recalls the countercultural movement of the sixties in this country, with its anarchic assertion of the emancipatory power of the Dionysian impulse, its celebration of youth and beauty in their ephemeral phYSical forms, and its romantic affirmation of the redeeming virtue of love. The author has further enriched the symbolic level ofthis book by infusing this vision with mythical themes from the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber. The underground homosexual community of New Park in Crystal Boys, like residents ofthe Ta-kuan yiian (Prospect Garden) in the famous traditional novel, is ruled by the supreme order ofch'ing (sentimentality) and hsin (the heart), which can be both salvational and damning. This microcosm, however, is extremely vulnerable, as it is forever overshadowed by the law of the father-the dominant order of the patriarchal, Confucianist society outside the garden. The prominence ofthe father-quest motif in both Family Crisis and Crystal Boys-heroes in both novels are constantly searching for paternal surrogates-betrays their authors' anxiety over the general corruption of the terms governing human relationships in contemporary Taiwan society, terms that in history were solidly built on the patriarchal order. In their attempts to transform this anxiety into art, Enlightenment rationalism has functioned for these writers at both the artistic and the ideological levels. At the artistic level, the notion of aesthetics and morality as separate spheres has provided them with the distance necessary for their relentless self-analysis, as both writers have made extensive use of autobiographical raw material of a profoundly disturbing nature. At the ideological

15 Introduction

level, visions of alternative cultural models conceived with emancipatory ideals have been used against pressures from neo-Confucianist ethical prescriptions. Even though both writers may still be somewhat skeptical about the new myths they have valorized, as a careful reading oftheir texts readily reveals, their strong desire to free themselves from the shackles oftradition while still maintaining moral decency-the primary virtue sought in the Western ideology in question-has been manifestly expressed. In his illustration ofthe thesis that the detachment of art from the praxis of life is a historically determined process closely tied to the development of bourgeois society, Peter Biirger, in his book Theory of the Avant-Garde, cites Habermas as follows: '.'Autonomous art only establishes itself as bourgeois society develops, the economic and political systems become detached from the cultural one, and the traditionalist world pictures which have been undermined by the basis ideology offair exchange release the art from their ritual use" (qtd. in Burger 24).10 It is true that an essential condition for the development of bourgeois society, the democratic political system, has yet to be instated fully in Taiwan. Yet, as revealed by such terms as "soft authoritarianism" or "totalitarian pluralism," coined by social scientists to characterize the hybrid nature of Taiwan's political practice, the state-society relationship in Taiwan departs from the commonly assumed model. For my purposes, it is important to point out that, under the state-monitored process of modernization, a bourgeOiS society with all its essential characteristics has been rapidly taking shape in Taiwan and that the Western-influenced liberals have served as an important driVing force of this process. Before their setback in the 1970S with the rise ofmore radical political activists, the liberals presented a considerable threat to the authoritarian government, which was evidenced by the famous crackdowns on the magazines Tzu-yu Chung-kuo [Free China] and Wen-hsing [Literary star] in the sixties and Ta-hsiieh tsa-chih [The intellectuals] in the early seventies.ll The Modernists, sympathetic with liberal ideals, had also been surreptitiously undermining the government's neotraditionalist cultural discourse by endorSing capitalist social values in their works. 12 The Modernists' support for the prinCiple of artistic autonomy is therefore in step with the larger direction of the overall social development in Taiwan. However, the confirmation that the Modernists' aesthetic doctrines are natural products ofthe society's contemporary development still leaves

16 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

the more complicated problems pertaining to literary history. The extent to which the specific development ofaesthetic features in this movement corresponds to the much longer evolutionary process of Western modernism is often debated but seldom carefully examined. It may be determined by tracing the stage-to-stage development of a prominent modernist trait, the shifting of emphasis from content to form and the conscious refinement of literary technique. It is frequently noted that the Modernists have devoted exceptional attention to craftsmanship and exhibited unusual consciousness of language. It has been insufficiently observed, however, that, in the later stage of the movement, writers such as Wang Wen-hsing, Wang Chen-ho, and Li Yungp'ing took a rather extreme aesthetic stance by ascribing an almost transcendent value to artistic language. These writers' dedication ofmany years' assiduous effort to the refinement of fictional language places them in the Flaubertian tradition of professional artistry. This phenomenon, following Marxist theories of modernism, can be perceived as reflecting the objectification of art in bourgeois society. As Jochen Schulte-Sasse summarizes Peter Biirger's points in the foreword to the latter's book, during the second half of the nineteenth centurYf in the period of aestheticism and symbolism, artists became increasingly self-conscious about "writing techniques, how material is applied, and its potential for effect." These concerns can be explained as resulting from the writer's desire to be in greater control of the means of production. Correspondingly, therefore, this period also witnessed "the aesthetic sensitizing of art's audience," presumably to prepare qualified customers for the commodity "art" (xiii).13 It is arguable that although Taiwan's Modernist literary movement has taken place in a "postmodern" period-since the 19SOS and 196os-and although many newer artistic trends and techniques have been incorporated by the Modernist ~Nriters into their work, the dominant tendency of this movement nevertheless is closest to the early phase of Western modernism, the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In other words, in the extremely compressed timetable of Taiwan's Modernist literary movement, one nevertheless discerns features such as the reversal of the conventional content-form hierarchy and the radical rejection oftraditional writing techniques that can only be the result of a burgeoning skepticism about language and meaning. Most of the Modernists' explorations

17 Introduction

of language unmistakably reflect Western influences. However, more original experiments have also been done that are results of a new awareness of the unstable relationship between language and its referents as well as of a reawakened sensitivity toward the ideographic nature of the Chinese language. These experiments, especially those found in Wang Wen-hsing's two novels FamHy Crisis and Pei-hai te jen [Backed against the sea] (1981), and Li Yung-p'ing's latest story series Chi-ling ch'un-ch'iu [Chronicle of Chi-ling] (1986), which mark the apex ofthe development ofmodernist aestheticism in contemporary Chinese literature, merit more scholarly attention than they have received. In asserting that the dominant tendency in the Modernist literary movement corresponds to the aesthetic phase of Western modernism, I am at the same time trying to refute the common belief that part of this movement is avant-garde. The theoretical basis of this argument is again taken from Peter Biirger's book, which offers a new perception ofthe avant-garde movement as something radically different from modernism. In Biirger's view, "modernism may be understandable as an attack on traditional writing techniques, but the avant-garde can only be understood as an attack meant to alter institutionalized commerce with art"; the two movements thus have drastically different social roles (Schulte-Sasse XV).14 The extreme popularity of works with characteristically avant-garde stylistic features in the initial stage of Taiwan's Modernist literary movement was short-lived. Many writers who practiced the style later dismissed this tendency as superfluous, and some even reverted to extremely conventional narrative methods. As the prinCiple ofartistic autonomy soon became a subject ofdispute and writers of the Modernist generation were busily engaged in either its defense or its criticism in terms prescribed by the socialistically inclined Nativists, there was no further development ofthe particular form ofprotest entailed by the avant-garde enterprise. At least for the Modernist generation, the informing spirit of the Western avant-garde movement, the radical turning "against the institution 'art' and the mode in which autonomy functions," has never been of any recognizable significance. Given the argument that no distinct avant-garde tradition has been established in Taiwan, I would nonetheless point out that at least one important factor that laid the foundation of the avant-garde and other antiaesthetic trends in the West, namely, the recognition of the inconsequentiality ofart

18 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

in modern society, had a profound impact on the Modernists. The rational acceptance of art's ineffectuality in modern society by Taiwan's Modernists can ultimately account for a critical difference between them and the pre-I949 Chinese writers, including their liberal predecessors who fought heartily for the independence of art from politics. I will return to this point after examining another topic of interest, the precarious development of artistic autonomy within the larger historical context of modern Chinese literature in this century. In the last two decades, critics of the Modernists have invariably blamed them for an escapist, decadent, and "ivory tower" mentality; it is perhaps time to look at these preponderant inclinations of the Modernists as effective means in their resistance of prevailing social and political constraints. There is perhaps no need to elaborate on the illegitimate, coercive, and frequently violent political impositions on Chinese writers in the last half century. However, it must still be stressed that moralists have imposed no less pressure on the writers by frequently criticizing them for indulging in depictions of "immoral behavior" or for failing to fulfill the uproper functions" of literature.1s The struggle of modern Chinese writers for greater freedom from these constraints did not start, ofcourse, with Taiwan's Modernists but has a history as long as the history of modern Chinese literature itself It is well known that modern Chinese literature came into being largely through the efforts of such eminent intellectuals and political activists as Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, who saw in Western fiction the potential to strengthen China. From the very beginning, therefore, this literature has been burdened with such great missions as "national self-strengthening" and "cultural transformation." The polemics of literary debates between groups of different ideological persuasions throughout the May Fourth period and the thirties generally centered on how to accomplish such tasks rather than whether they were beyond the proper domain of literature. Modern Chinese writers are exceptionally susceptible to political involvement partly because literature, once a required subject in the civil service examination, remained throughout China's imperial period an integral part of the education of the gentry class, from which the country's officials were selected. Although literature's practical functions for an individual's career advance-

19 Introduction

ment in the traditional system were largely dismantled with the founding of the Republic in 1911, the residual elements of the gentry code, which gave literature an important social role, have remained strong even to this date. The country's political leaders have repeatedly exploited this tradition as an efficient means to enlist intellectuals' support. Before the effectively totalitarian Communist government was established in 1949, however, voices against this particular form ofabuse were often heard. Anglo-American liberal scholars, for example, played an important role in this protest. Because members ofthe Hsin-yiieh she (Crescent Moon Society) known for their promotion of apolitical views of literature, served as an important link between the pre- 1949 liberal tradition and that of post- 1949 Taiwan, it may be useful to briefly examine the similarities and differences between their ideas about literature and those of the Modernists. Liang Shih-ch'iu, whose criticisms ofthe shifting demands ofradical polities and leftist dogma were made known by his debates with Lu Hsiin around 1924, is probably the most prominent figure of this liberal group. As Liang's writing documents, however, despite their distrust of the extreme utilitarian view of literature, the pre- 1949 liberals never went so far as to sponsor the aestheticist view, which entails a more or less complete dissociation of art from the function ofmoral edification.16 Liang's position to a great extent also represents that of Taiwan's liberal intellectuals, notably those of the Modernist generation. Yen Yuan-shu, for example, is known to have propounded the function of literature as "criticism of life." The difference between the preand post-I949 liberal literary scholars is that the latter tend to borrow authority more from the Western liberal-humanist tradition (represented by Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis) and less from the Chinese classics than their predecessors did. The Modernist writers, too, have inherited from the Western liberalhumanist tradition the concept that literature's ultimate goal is to represent the timeless qualities ofthe human condition. Pai Hsien-yung, in his defense ofOu-yang Tzu against the Nativist attacks, has argued that the primary function of literature is to impart knowledge about "universal human nature" (Mo-jan 41-42). Wang Wen-hsing, despite his strong aesthetic tendencies, also sees the difference between serious and popular literature as resting in the former's power to "tell something about the meaning of life." 17 Insofar as

20

Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

they have viewed art as a privileged form of interpreting reality, the Modernists must still be considered to have endorsed a fundamentally moralistic view of literature. What has significantly distinguished Taiwan's Modernists from their pre1949 liberal predecessors is their pessimistic recognition of the inconsequentiality of literature in modern society. The seam between liberal ideals and the reality of bourgeois society has so widened in the course of Taiwan's social development that the Modernists could not but acknowledge the social limitations of their literary endeavors, although they may console themselves with the beliefthat art's positive functions apply to a select group.18 The most pointed expression ofthe Modernists' views about literature's social function is found in a famous (or notorious, from the Nativists' perspective) speech, "Hsiang-t'u wen-hsiieh te kung yii kuo" [Merits and mistakes of Nativist literature], given by Wang Wen-hsing at the 'height ofthe Nativist literary movement, at Taipei's Tien Education Center in 1978. In this speech, Wang Wen-hsing said that he believes the only purpose of literature is "to give pleasure"-nothing else (520). This pleasure, ofcourse, is not defined in the hedonist sense. For morally inclined readers, he argued, pleasure is to be derived precisely from good literature's potential for moral gratification (521). Whereas his opponents argue that"good literature caters to the taste of both the naive and the sophisticated, low-brow and high-brow readers," Wang responds that "art by definition carries a class distinction" (522). A timeless masterpiece like Dream of the Red Chamber does not actually appeal to readers of all classes· in the same way; some readers can see nothing but the love story between Pao-yii and Tai-yii, whereas others are enlightened by its intellectual themes and its insights about human nature (,5'24). The self-styled proletarian writers are only deceiving themselves in believing that they write for the working class, since working class readers never enjoy reading their works. "They as a rule like to read stories that are as far removed from their real lives as pOSSible" (521). Wang's arid humor and profuse use of rhetorical irony succeeded in irritating his audience, many ofwhom sympathized with the Nativists' ideal of an egalitarian society. While Wang's speech revealed the fundamental conflict between the Modernists and the Nativists, it also made it evident that the artistic beliefs of the Modernists presumed such liberal notions as "social

21

Introduction

stratification" and "cultural pluralism," which precluded the grand scheme ofnationwide cultural transformation envisioned by the pre-1949 writers. Perhaps the critical difference between the Modernists' conception of literature's limited social use and similar propositions found in the pre- 1949 era may be illuminated by a comparison of the Modernists and Chou Tsojen. In his essays written during the 1930S and 1940S, Chou Tso-jen denied that art has any practical use and refuted the didactic tsai-tao tradition in favor of the expressionist yen-chih tradition.19 Although there is a similarity in Chou's and Wang Wen-hsing's protest of the illegitimate use of literature by their adversaries, Chou's reassertion of the nonutilitarian aspect of art is clearly conceived in a traditional way. David Pollard has put it this way: "There was an underlying conception of the role of literature which arose naturally from his [Chou Tso-jen's] background. It was not something that made epochs, not the particular province of the exceptionally gifted man, but a normal activity for an educated man" (47). In traditional Chinese society, the function of literature is closely tied to the lifestyIe ofConfucian literati, who are supposed to engage in the cultivation of an ideal personhood as a daily routine. Chou Tso-jen's shift from writing "progressive" essays in the 1920S to writing on such subjects as flora, fauna, and local customs is generally perceived as a sign of the frustration of a man of letters deeply aware of his own powerlessness. From another perspective, this behavior may be compared to the wise man's "hibernation" in unfavorable times according to the long-standing tradition ofthe recluse, a tradition that has functioned negatively to consolidate the Confucian system ofrule. It can even be argued that Chou's traditional familiar essays on trivial subjects are built on the Taoist metaphYSical presupposition ofthe existence ofa unitary prinCiple underlying all animate and inanimate beings in the cosmos, which implies a passive but nevertheless optimistic worldview. By contrast, the Modernists are more fundamentally pessimistic. Their concession to the inefficacy of literature under the totalizing social system ofmodern times leads to a rational resignation, a withdrawal from the public sphere and a devotion to writing that, though it may be understood as affirmative, is not without a tragic resonance. The Flaubertian commitment to creative art as craft presupposes the institutionalization of art as a specialized profeSSion in bourgeOiS society. In the Modernists' dedication to

22 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

perfecting their craftsmanship, therefore, rests an overriding concern with effect on readers, which suggests a writer-reader relationship radically different from the model of traditional men of letters who treated writing as part of the lifelong project of self-cultivation. Nonetheless, viewed from another perspective, the Modernists' preoccupation with the aesthetic use of language still in the final analysis enables them to come to terms with the sociological dimension of prose fiction. According to M. M. Bakhtin, "All languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points of view of the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values" ("Discourse" 292). In such later works as Wang Chen-ho's Mei-kuei mei-kuei wo-ai-ni [Rose, rose, I love you] (1984) and Wang Wen-hsing's Backed Against the Sea, which I consider a masterpiece of Taiwan's Modernist literary movement, the principle ofheteroglossia is consciously explored. Both authors' extensive parodic use of language is targeted at the unexamined ideological assumptions in contemporary Taiwan society, many of which come from residual worldviews from the past. Together with Crystal Boys and Family Crisis, these works are specific historical products of the cultural transition (or, in Fredric Jameson's term, the bourgeOiS cultural revolution) of Chinese society in Taiwan in the course ofmodernization, products that perform the function of "decoding" older value systems. The latent violence that underscores the seemingly relaxed East-West confrontation finally surfaces in the works of the Modernists' mature stage.

CHAPTER TWO

The Rise of the Modernist Trend Writers active in the forty-year period discussed in this book are usually divided into three "generations," or tai-an approximate translation of "generation," although tai are only ten to fifteen years apart. Most ofthe Modernists discussed in this work, with the exception ofLi Ang and Li Yung-p'ing, belong to the "middle" generation, who were in their early teens around 1949 and who started their literary careers under the modernist influence in the 1960s. As not uncommon universally, there was a tendency for the Modernists, as newcomers on the literary scene, to define themselves in contradistinction to their older contemporaries. The differences between the two generations of writers as perceived by the Modernists themselves have by and large been accepted by critics and commentators. First, it is widely assumed that the Modernist literary movement reacted against the anti-Communist propaganda in literature in the 1950S. True, the Modernists' liberal tendency caused them to object to governmentsponsored "combat literature" and to disapprove ofwriters who lent it their service. However, such an objection is directed more toward the politicization of literature than to the government's political stance itself As will be demonstrated in later chapters, most Modernists were in fact staunch anti-Communists themselves, even though they did not necessarily endorse their own government's authoritarianism. The fact that the older generation of writers was more willing to compromise is partly explained by the tighter political control during the 1950S. Moreover, since many of them were mainlanders who followed the Nationalists to Taiwan around 1949,1

24 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

these writers were in general more easily mobilized in the state-sponsored cultural programs. Second, in addition to political propaganda, writers of the fifties are frequently faulted for their amateurism, which is partly the product ofa special institution in Taiwan, the fu-k'an, or literary supplement to newspapers. The fu-k'an undeniably has been the most significant sponsor of literary activities in contemporary Taiwan; nevertheless, with its large demand for works with immediate popular appeal, it at the same time fostered casual, lightweight writings as well as middle-brow literary tastes. As literary writing became less professional, the distinction between artistic and journalistic genres was often blurred. It is understandable that the Modernists, who had a propensity for orthodox generic concepts and treated literature as a form of high art, were largely dissatisfied with the mediocrity that typifies writings produced in this environment. Although the general climate in the I9S0S was not conducive to the production of serious art, works of considerable artistic merit by a number of writers deserve greater critical attention than usually given to them. Even more pertinent to this study, the conventional artistic outlook in such works offers a context for understanding the range of changes that the Modernists have brought to Taiwan's literary scene. The first part of this chapter thus deals with two broad categories of writings by these older-generation writers, traditionalist prose and realistic fiction, represented by four authors: Ch'i-chiin, Lin Hai-yin, Chu Hsi-ning, and P'an Jen-mu. The second part, then, explores various new artistic orientations ushered in by the Modernists, with illustrations drawn from the work of Ou-yang Tzu.

Writers of the Older Generation and the Dominant Culture Traditionalist Prose Contrary to the situation in the People's Republic of China, where gentry literature of China's feudal past was sometimes renounced for ideological reasons and where numerous political idioms designed to mobilize the masses were added to the vocabulary, the prose style in post-I949 Taiwan tended to be more literary, retaining a great many more archaic expressions and allusions to classical literature. This phenomenon is apparently a direct

25 The Rise of the Modernist Trend

result ofthe cultural policy ofthe Nationalist government, which promoted traditional culture partly as a means to assert its own legitimacy as a Chinese government. In practice, the dominant culture's selective emphaSiS on the lyrical strand of New Literature from the pre-1949 era veered the stylistic development of literary writing in speCific directions. The selection of works by such writers as Hsii Chih-mo and Chu Tzu-ch'ing for middleschool textbooks, for instance, contributed to the popularity ofthe former's exotic, flamboyant, European-flavored aestheticism and the latter's genteel, refined, traditional Chinese senSibility. Such styles, however, easily deteriorated with overuse by writers of lesser caliber. The Modernists started their movement by launching harsh criticisms at the contemporary literary style, faulting it as heavily loaded with trite phrases and excessive embellishment, thus lacking in precision and originality. Much of their own language use, therefore, was conceived precisely to correct such tendencies. The success oftheir "language revolution" varies from writer to writer, but the Modernists' challenge of contemporary stylistic practice points to a deeper disagreement between their aesthetic conception and that of the traditionalists. As the eminent sinologistJaroslav Prusek put it, traditional Chinese literature is a refined, sensitive form of polite writing, one in which "all experiences had to pass the censorship ofbeauty[,] only what was wen or 'beautiful' being allowed to pass into the temple ofliterature, also deSignated wen, while all evil and ugly emotions were excluded" (10). Although more than haIfa century has passed since the New Literature replaced the old, traditional aesthetic assumptions and the "censorship of beauty" are still prevalent among Chinese readers and writers, espeCially among older people. Such readers ineVitably find the modernist aesthetic disturbing. The Modernists have too frequently used the ugly, the sensational, and even the scandalous to shock. They are obsessed with the hidden darkness ofthe human psyche, and their exposure of conflicts in ethical relations is deemed both subversive and indecorous. A brief comparison of the thematic treatment of the father-son relationship in two well-known literary works, Chu Tzu-ch'ing's essay "Peiying" [Reflections ofmy father] (1926?) ofthe New Literature's lyrical strand and Wang Wen-hsing's Modernist novel Family Crisis, may bring into focus the·fundamental difference between the traditionalists and the modernists. That both Chu's and Wang's works are to a certain extent autobiographi-

26 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

cal makes these works especially interesting, as they reveal ways in which these authors explore available literary conventions to cope with some deep personal concerns. The narrator of "Reflections," at the time of writing, is tormented by a gnawing sense of remorse as he recalls his own insensitivity toward his father on an earlier occasion, when the latter saw him off at the train station. The son's annoyance at the father's ineffiCiency, clumsiness, and other signs of old age, while being vividly and honestly portrayed, soon becomes the subject for self-reproach. And the father's deteriorated state of health is qUickly recognized as the consequence of his lifelong sacrifice for the family. The son in Wang Wen-hsing's Family Crisis is so intensely enraged by his father's feeblemindedness and senility that he will not let him finish his birthday meal. After the miserable father runs away from home, the son, distressed and guilt-ridden, goes on a long search, only to come to the realization that, in the father's absence, mother and son have actually led a much happier and healthier life. That in Chu Tzu-ch'ing's story the slight deviance from the norm of a filial relationship is hurriedly put into a "proper" perspective is dictated by the traditionalist literary convention, which endorses a moralistic worldview. The way Wang Wen-hsing dissects the love-hate relationship between father and son with a relentless candor, in contrast, reveals a modernist ideology: the ugliness of the son's emotion is used to demystify the socially constructed sacrosanctity ofparenthood, and to acknowledge rationally the dehumanizing natural and economic laws that govern our lives. The Modernists' radical use of literature to explore human reality upset the sense ofpropriety ofthe more traditionally inclined readers and writers. For them, literary writing served a different set offunctions, which are best exemplified by the work of Ch'i-chiin. The proliferation of traditionalist prose in Taiwan during the 1950s, in the forms ofthe familiar essay and the hybrid genre ofessay-fiction, was apparently a continuation ofan earlier trend on the mainland during and after the Sino-Japanese War.2 Although a number of writers (such as Chang Hsiu-ya, Chung Mei-yin, and Hsii Chung-p'ei) earned literary reputation as essayists,

27 The Rise of the Modernist Trend

none of them is a match for Ch'i-chiin, who has continued to be prolific and popular for more than thirty years. The subject matter of Ch'i-chiin's writing is unusually repetitive: a striking number of works collected in her twenty-odd volumes are childhood reminiscences centering on a few characters and events. Even in works that resemble fiction, such as "Chi" [The Chignon] (1969), "Ah Yii" [Ah Yii] (1956), "Ch'i-yiieh te ai-shang" [The sorrow of July] (1971), and "Chii-tzu hung Ie" [The oranges are red] (1987), the autobiographical element remains strong. In fact, as nicely suggested by the title of a book on Ch'i-chiin, Ch'i-chiin te shih-chieh [The world of Ch'i Chiin], the unfailing appeal ofCh'i-chiin's work rests precisely in the authentic aura of the stories' persona, perceived to be Ch'i-chiin herself The daughter ofan illustrious scholar-official of the early Republican era, liVing in a country estate with her mother, Ch'i-chiin had a childhood typical of the rural gentry, with which many older middle-class mainlanders identified. Many such readers saw in Ch'i-chiin's works their own pasts recaptured: childhoods in the countryside, large households filled with the exhilaration ofseasonal festivals, and the toil ofclassical lessons with austere family tutors. Then came the move to a larger city to attend Western-style schools and the hardships and separations during the Sino-Japanese War. Ch'i-chiin's parents, the main characters of her works, also represent familiar types. Her father was a traditional scholar-official in an age oftransition. Although open-minded enough to send his daughter to college, in his own home he was a patriarch who married twice and neglected his first wife, Ch'i-chiin's mother. The mother, then, was a devout Buddhist who endured life's adversities with traditional female virtues. The attraction ofCh'i-chiin's work for readers in post- 1949 Taiwan is thus closely tied to the nostalgic sentiments of Taiwan's mainland expatriates. In addition to nostalgia, the literati lifestyle depicted in Ch'i-chiin's work embodies the older ideal ofgentility: reading a book during sleepless nights ("When I had a dream at midnight, I took a book as my pillow" is actually a book title of hers) ,3 relishing poetry over a pot of hot tea during a friend's visit-in short, treating ·everyday, ordinary events with cultured sensitivity and thus deriving aesthetic delight. Her literary competence distinguishes Ch'i-chiin from numerous other writers on similar subjects. Her prose style is lucid and spontaneous, mixing classical erudition with the subtle musi-

28 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

cality ofnatural language. Ch'i-chiin's pedigree, the fact that she has studied under the famous scholar of ts'u (the "lyric," a subgenre of traditional Chinese poetry) Professor Hsia Ch'eng-t'ao and had a learned Buddhist recluse for a childhood tutor, further elicited respect from her readers. The thematic aspects of Ch'i-chiin's works are also pronouncedly traditional, as I will illustrate with a highly acclaimed story of hers, "The Chignon." "The Chignon" is a simple autobiographical story in which the author/narrator reminisces about a series ofpast events in which she sensed a tension between her mother and her father's younger and prettier second wife. She recalls how the latter's ornate hairstyle, an S-shaped chignon, was a constant reminder of her mother's inferiority in their competition for the husband's affection. The animosity between the two women, however, is dissolved after the husband's death, when they "become friends in their mutual suffering." At this time, the daughter's sense of indignation is also assuaged. After both her parents have passed away, she lives with her father's second wife and is then capable ofempathizing with the aging woman who no longer wears fancy hairdos. The story concludes with a lament on the transience of life and the futility ofthe human struggle. Both the narrator and her mother adhered to the principle of passivity. Instead of identifying the oppressor in an unjust system, here polygamy, the story evokes the virtue of wen-jou tun-hou (geniality and sincerity) and relieves personal griefwith the Buddhist and Taoist principle ofnonaction. The extreme popularity of this work is undoubtedly an effect of its potential to fulfill modern Chinese readers' yearning for certain residual cultural ideals. In this sense the work may be compared with two other memorable traditionalist works in modern Chinese literary history, Chu Tzu-ch'ing's "Reflections of My Father" and Yang Chiang's Kan-hsiao liu chi [Six chapters from my life "downunder"] (1983) (the latter is a PRC woman intellectual's touching memoir of her experience in a "cadre school" during the Cultural Revolution). Although all three authors harbor a sense of grief, they consistently refuse to view the cause ofsuffering from a sociohistorical perspective. The human wrongdoings that inflict pain on others, be they the grievance of a neglected wife, the loneliness of an aging father, or the more atrocious crimes committed during the Cultural Revolution, are absolved in the authors' dignified state ofmind, best characterized by the phrase ai er pu shang-genUinely sorrowful and commiserative, but without rancor.

29 The Rise of the Modernist Trend

Although the lyrical works of Chi-chiin are remarkably successful, her attempts at writing realistic modern fiction are, with few exceptions, full of blunders. In her short stories collected in Ching chieh [Sister Ching] (1956), for example, visions similar to those found in her essays are conveyed at the expense of oversimplified human relationships and idealized characters, giving her work a heavy dose of sentimentalism and didacticism. Evidently, the traditional mind-set, the ideological force behind the popularity of Ch'i-chiin's essays, is inherently in contradiction with the very generic conventions of the modern short story that the Modernists endeavored to consolidate.

Realistic Fiction Having in their formative years been exposed to works of Lu Hsiin, Mao Tun, Pa Chin, and Lao She, writers of the older generation by and large carried on the Chinese "realist" tradition-a somewhat atrophied version of nineteenth-century European realism-established during the May Fourth era and the thirties. For political reasons, however, they conSCiously or unconSCiously modified those realistic conventions that might have been offensive to the dominant culture of the post-1949 Taiwan: revolutionary and proletarian themes were taboo, and references to class-consciousness were also to be avoided. Nevertheless, the nature of literary conventions is such that their suppression can never be as complete as it appears on the surface. From a scholarly point of view, the textual strategies employed by these writers to transform subtly highly tendentious Chinese realistic conventions in order to fulfill a different set of ideological requirements are of great research interest. The 1950S saw the publication of several well-written, "anti-Communist" realistic novels, such as Yang-ko [Rice-sprout song], Hsuan-feng [The whirlWind], and Ti-ts'un chuan [The Ti village]. Although important in their own right, the fact that these stories were set exclusively in pre-Revolution China and their authors either never resided in Taiwan (e.g., Eileen Chang) or were marginal to Taiwan's literary scene (e.g., Chiang Kuei and Ch'en Hsi-ying) diminishes their significance to Taiwan's post-1949 literary history. Far more relevant are such writers as Wang Lan, Meng Yao, P'an Jen-mu, Lin Hai-yin, Nieh Hua-ling, P'eng Ko, Chu Hsi-ning, Tuan Ts'ai-hua, Ssu-ma Chung-yiian,

30 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

and Chung Chao-cheng, writers who established their literary reputations around the mid-1950S and who have ever since played prominent roles on Taiwan's literary scene.4 Although these writers' fiction works are also filled with nostalgic recollections of the mainland past, they are nevertheless unique products of the contemporary cultural and political environment. On the one hand, unmistakably, the emancipation ethos, a legacy of pre- 1949 realist literature, has informed a number of their writings set in the past on subjects such as the oppression of women, the repressive nature of the traditional Chinese family system, and the pathetic condition ofworking-class people and domestic servants. On the other hand, the realistic codes have been rewritten and the critical messages mitigated or displaced: rightist political convictions and active support for the present government frequently caused these writers to domesticate the revolutionary spirit with counterdevices and to shift the thematic focus from the sociohistorical to the private domain. Extrinsic political motives and conformist spirit have considerably stigmatized the work of writers of the older generation in the eyes of serious literary critics. The following discussion of three representative writers of this group, by no means adequate to redress this critical bias, will nevertheless concentrate on a commonly misunderstood aspect of their works, namely, the way in which ideological messages are expressed-or, rather, suppressed-and the frequently adverse effect oftheir ideology on their art. An English anthology of Taiwan fiction, The Unbroken Chain, includes a story

by Lin Hai-yin, "Ch'un-chiu" [Lunar New Year's feast] (1953) (68-73), which satirizes the snobbery and a certain "transit passenger" mentality of some well-to-do mainlanders in Taipei, whose privileges were closely tied to the Nationalist bureaucracy.5 Although this story shows Lin at her best as a realistic writer, its explicit criticism ofcontemporary social reality is by no means typical of her work as a whole. Much more frequently found in her work is a healthy, forward-looking attitude toward life, best exemplified by such lighthearted domestic comedies as "Lii-tsao yii hsien-tan" [Green seaweed and salted eggs] (1956), the title story ofan English translation of Lin's work. The private domain oflife has been a focus ofattention in literature ofthe liberal camp ofwriters throughout modern Chinese history. The Wen-hsiieh yen-chiu she (Association for Literary Studies), for instance, advocated a

31

The Rise of the Modernist Trend

"literature for life's sake"; and members of the Crescent Moon Society are known for their delicate taste for humor and their subtle appreciation ofthe "joy of life." At times, Lin's pragmatic spirit reminds one ofthe May Fourth woman writer Ling Shu-hua, whose heroines, when tested by life's adversities, often find recourse in the virtues of moderation and prudence. Many of Lin's stories that deal with the hardships of middle-class families in the 19S0S are also underscored by a compromising spirit. In stories that are set in the past, Lin sometimes displays a critical edge comparable to that of the best realistic writers of the thirties. Two such stories, "Chu" [Candle] (1962) and "Chin Li-yii te pai-chien ch'iin" [Golden carp's wedding gown] (1964), deserve special attention for their dramatic plot structure and effectively conveyed feminist theme of protest. The protagonist in "Candle" is the mistress of a mandarin family in the earlier part of the century. When her husband takes a servant's daughter, Autumn Girl, as concubine, she fakes an illness and becomes bedridden. The mistress's withdrawal from her normal life and household responsibilities has a malicious, vengeful edge-Autumn Girl must shoulder all the domestic chores in addition to waiting on the invalid. When after a long day's hard work, Autumn Girl retires to her bedroom where their husband is waiting, the mistress, wide awake, would listen attentively with gnawing jealousy to their flirtatious laughter. Eventually, the bedridden mistress outlives everyone to become a nuisance to her son's family. Always huddled in a dark corner of her bedroom, the aged woman is seen with a small section of burnt-down candle, an apt symbol of her self-consuming pains. Golden Carp, the heroine ofanother story, is a slave girl who at the age of sixteen has been taken by the master ofthe house as a concubine. She soon gives birth to a son, which is seen as a woman's highest accomplishment in life, comparable to a man's passing the imperial examination. Whereas the son comes to enjoy a high status as the only male offspring of the house, Golden Carp remains a lowly concubine, no more respected than a bondmaid. When the time comes for her son's wedding, however, Golden Carp feels that her real status should finally be acknowledged. Now that it is the Republican era, she ponders, people should be entitled to a certain degree of freedom. She qUietly orders for herself a resplendent outfit, a skirt of "a hundred plaits," made of bright red brocade, embroidered with golden magpies and plum blossoms. According to the old custom, however, such

32 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

magnificently decorated dress is only to be worn by the real ladies of the house, and Golden Carp's presumptuous attempt at elevating her own status is easily defeated: the mistress suddenly announces that on the wedding day the women in the family will all dress in the modern-style ch'i-p'ao, which is, after all, the latest fashion in town. Lin has written several other stories on similar subjects, such as "Hsiin" [Buried alive] (1957)-in which the virgin widow, a Willing victim of the feudal chastity code, substitutes for conjugal love a secret admiration of her brother-in-Iaw-and several episodes in Lin's autobiographical story series, Ch'eng-nan chiu-shih [Old stories of south Peking] (1960), but their critical messages are much more implicit. "Candle" and "Golden Carp's Wedding Gown" are distinguished by their tragic overtones. The characters' resistance to a dehumanizing system, though ultimately futile and selfdestructive, is nevertheless a gesture of defiance. Moreover, by registering the complexity ofdomestic politiCS in China's patriarchal society, the author exposes the mechanisms by which women are made their own worst enemies. She has thus effectively criticized the oppressive social system without making any particular class the scapegoat. However, the framework of these stories potentially disqualifies them from consideration as works of "critical realism." Both works begin and end with the presence of a grandchild of the heroine, which relegates her story to one ofa bygone age. The children's ignorance ofthe wretched condition of women of their grandparents' generation, while being a source of dramatic irony, also serves to reassure the reader that the historical conditions responsible for such unjust treatment of women no longer exist. The new society, ifunaware ofthe evils of its own past, is nevertheless more civilized and enlightened. Therefore, instead ofcriticizing social ills or the feudal remnants in contemporary Taiwan society, the author reinforces the reader's contentment with the present. One can perceive a subtle affinity between the thematic device in these stories and that of the more blatantly political i-k'u (remembering the hardship of the past, namely, the days before "Liberation") motif in the People's Republic of China: in both cases, criticism of China's feudal past serves to ratify the present SOCiopolitical order. Born to a Christian gentry family in northern China, Chu Hsi-ning served in the Nationalist army from the time of the Sino-Japanese War and has

33 The Rise of the Modernist Trend

been Taiwan's best-known military writer since the mid-1950S. The majority of Chu's early fiction, collected in Lang [Wolf] (1963), T'ieh-chiang [Soup of melted iron] (1963), and P'o-hsiao shih-fen [At daybreak] (1967), is set against the background of China in the I930S and I940S, especially in the rural areas. Although Chu has admitted that these stories are built on rather hazy memories of his mainland hometown, which he left at a rather young age, several critics have remarked that Chu's fiction could easily be taken for works that were written in the thirties. This comment powerfully attests to the notion of intertextuality, to the fact that literary texts are primarily produced by other literary texts rather than reflecting the authors' observation of an "objective" reality. However, although on the surface Chu's work closely resembles the realist literature ofthe thirties, its ideological content is almost opposite in nature. The historical and geographical settings of many of Chu's stories are strongly reminiscent of Mao Tun's "Spring Silkworms" and Wu Tsu-hsiang's Anhwei stories. Their rural characters, too, seem to suffer from the same social ills prevalent in that particular period of modern Chinese history: bandits, landlords, corrupt officials, and a collapsing rural economy. However, the registration of such disturbing social conditions in Chu's fiction seldom leads to logical inquiry about the complex historical factors behind them. Typically, disasters are explained in terms of personal eccentricity, moral conflict, or the capricious workings offate. The frequent employment ofa naive narrator also conveniently serves the purpose ofevading political judgment. For example, the rampant bureaucratic corruption and moral degeneration of the land-owning gentry class in "P'o-hsiao shih-fen" [At daybreak] (1963) is not criticized as a historical phenomenon but presented with dark humor, and it merely serves as the background of the young hero's initiation into an unconvincingly portrayed adult world. The amusing short piece "Lo-ch'e shang" [On the mule cart] (1957) mentions nothing about the imperialism, capitalism, class exploitation, or foreign aggression that have apparently forced Chinese peasants like the Ch'e family to sell their land at a loss. Instead, it focuses on a Simple didactic message: in bad times, a gentleman goes out of his way to help a neighbor in need. It seems that the chivalric spirit of the individual alone is sufficient to redress the wrong and to teach a lesson to the greedy landlord. "Hsiao Ts'ui yii Ta Hei-niu"

34 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

[Little Jade and Big Black Ox] (1960) deals with a young man's frustration with his family-arranged marriage when he secretly admires his cousin, but the potential marital tragedy is displaced by an implausible comic ending. Finally, although Chu's well-known story "T'ieh-chiang" [Soup of melted iron] (1961) may well be a story about the country folk's reaction to the onslaught of a modem economy, as Cyril Birch has suggested, its emphaSiS on the turning of the wheel offortune and its exaggeration of the extremity of an outmoded heroic code clearly makes individual eccentricity, rather than realistic comment on the historical process, its expliCit thematic focus. At times, therefore, it becomes evident that Chu is deliberately rewriting the realistic conventions to express his disagreement with the leftist ideological messages inscribed in them. Viewed from today's vantage point, two salient features of Chu's fiction may also be observed. First, in a significant sense, Chu's re-creation of an image of pre-Revolution China and his intertextual references to its realist tradition without its original ideological inscriptions have sprung from a young soldier's nostalgia for a lost homeland, and the motivation behind his evocation of the pre- 1949 literary tradition is more sentimental than artistic.6 In one ofhis early stories, "Yeh shih tzu-wei" [It's a different taste] (1963), Chu included a rather incongruous comment that randomly associates hUDgkuei, a Taiwanese rice cake dyed with red food color, with a "hot steamed bun dipped in human blood to cure tuberculosis," alluding to Lu Hsiin's "Yao" [Medicine]. As the analogy serves absolutely no thematic purpose in the story, it should rather be taken as a gesture of memory. Second, although Chu has frequently displaced the critical themes of realist literature with more purely literary effects-suspense, dramatic tensions, imaginative plots inspired by folk legends, and vividly rendered dark humor, even burlesque-he seems to be also conSCiously developing his own ideological system. Whereas one sometimes discerns in Lin Hai-yin a self-conscious evasion of sensitive topics and a voluntary compliance with political guidelines (her stories, for example, satisfy well the government's demand for the depiction ofthe "brighter" side ofSOCiety), Chu Hsi-ning is a more self-motivated conversative. Over the years, Chu has evolved an ideological outlook that goes beyond the government-imposed doctrines and combines Christian moralism, cultural sinocentrism, and a nativism that presumes an undivided China: the name of a literary club formed by Chu

35 The Rise of the Modernist Trend

and his younger proteges in the late 1970s, the "Double-Three Bookclub," for example, is explicitly ideological (the two "threes" stand for the Christian Trinity and Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles, respectively); a 1981 essay collection by Chu, Wei-yen p'ien [Chapters ofminced words], features a sentimental cultural chauvinism that extols everything Chinese;? and Chu's nativism, while different from the Taiwanese regionalism advocated by the Nativists, shares with it a tendency to romanticize the more primitive values of an agrarian community and to condemn modernization for its threat to the pastoral lifestyle. The ambition to develop an ideological system of his own seems to be already discernible in "Lang" [Wolf] (1961), an early story that received a great amount of critical attention. "Wolf" describes how an orphan boy's childless aunt, who mistreats the boy because she was offended by the boy's reluctance to call her "mother" on the first day she adopted him, is able to repent her wrongdOings after being remonstrated by the family's dismissed hired hand, Big Axle. The relationship between the aunt and Big Axle parallels the latter's battle with a shrewd wolfthat repeatedly attacks the family's herd. The symbolic dimension of this story apparently makes reference to the Christian notion of the battle between goodness and evil, represented by Big Axle and the aunt, respectively. These characters are unmistakably allegorical; while Big Axle's uncompromising hatred of the wolf is lauded as an expression of moral righteousness, the aunt embodies a variety of sins-lack of mercy, dishonesty, and adultery. The ending, however, seems to alter the nature ofthe spiritual battle by unconvincingly revealing that the aunt's wickedness, especially her sexual promiscuity, is entirely motivated by her overwhelming desire to have male offspring. Thus the upholding ofa time-tested community value, here the importance for a woman ofhaving a son, is able miraculously to redeem the woman's other sins. Consciously or not, this ending seems to be adapted from the ending ofShen Ts'ung-wen's famous story "Hsiao Hsiao," in which the birth ofa male child, though conceived by adultery, is so welcomed by the family of the child bride's young husband that she is spared punishment. Chu's story has several obvious weaknesses: the implaUSible psychological transformation ofthe aunt, the poorly integrated thematic lines, and the fascinating but digressive dramatization ofplot (for instance, episodes about the battle between Big Axle and the wolfare well written but unsubstantiated

36 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

by thematic demand). None of these, however, is as disconcerting as the awkward attempt to ascribe transcendent value to the indigenous customs of old China. Chu's slightly unorthodox version of the neotraditionalist conservatism of the dominant culture, although overly sentimental to the point of becoming an artistic liability, is nevertheless widely supported by a special social group in post- 1949 Taiwan, the country's middle-class mainlander expatriates. It provided the basis for the development of a vital cultural trend during the 1980s, the "cultural nostalgia" trend, in which second-generation mainlander writers ardently participated.8 P'an Jen-mu's expressly anti-Communist novel Lien-i piao-mei [My cousin Lien-i] (1951), which deals with the activities ofunderground leftist students on a college campus in China on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, at once shares speCific formal features with the realistic literature ofthe thirties and differs from that literature by virtue ofthe ways in which it evades representation of the crude reality of history. Written in the realistic form used by such revolutionary writers as Mao Tun and Ting Ling, the novel tries to offer an ideological interpretation of a complex historical phenomenon, and is among a few post- 1949 literary attempts to explain the traumatic loss of China in the fierce struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists. Exemplary ofthe cold war spirit, it attacks the Communists for illegitimately using the patriotism and vanity of young college students as instruments to usurp political power. And, to the extent that it tells a partial truth based on preconceived political views, the novel suffers from the same defiCiency as many other works in the Chinese realist tradition. It is therefore not the ideological committment itselfthat is at fault in this work. In fact, P'an's indignation toward radical polities on behalfofthe ordinary Chinese citizen, as represented by the father in the novel, is certainly legitimate;9 such law-abiding middle-level officials, who typically espoused moderate political reform, were precisely those most cruelly persecuted during the years when the Chinese mainland was ruled by an ultraleftist government. (P'an's assertion of the mainstream Confucianist philosophy ofgovernment, a philosophy that relies heavily on the good conscience and the moral rectitude ofscholar-officials, in her other stories on contemporary

37 The Rise of the Modernist Trend

subjects, such as "Ai-Ie hsiao t'ien-ti" [A small world of sorrow and happiness] and "Nao she chih yeh" [A night with the snake], further underscores this conservative political stance. In those stories, the characters' recourse to old gentry virtues to withstand hardship in difficult times, reminiscent of characters in Shen Ts'ung-wen's literary sketches written during the SinoJapanese War, seems to be motivated not merely by political allegiance to the Nationalist government, but also by a belief in certain positive qualities of the Chinese intellectual tradition.) That this novel has largely failed to live up to the promise of historical representation is more appropriately explained by P'an's "middle-brow" artistic vision, very much conditioned by the commercialized urban environment of Taiwan, which, in turn, is a continuation ofthat in the big cities of pre-Revolution China. With her delicate sensitivity to the irrational forces of life and to human perversity, and her strong inclination to interpret experience in terms of its unpredictability, P'an shows a close affinity with such urban women writers of the 1940S as Su Ch'ing and Eileen Chang, who frequently treated history as mere background for their stories ofromance.1o P'an's serious intentions in My Cousin Lien-i, therefore, are often trivialized by recurring bathos, witty but frivolous dialogues, and a melodramatic plot. If, as C. T. Hsia has observed, realistic novels of the thirties frequently suffer from ideological dogmas, unimaginative dialogues, and excessive length, then the problem of My Cousin Lien-i is precisely opposite: it is the generic traits ofmiddle-brow popular fiction that have deflated the work's capacity to represent history. P'an's fondness for coincidence and melodramatic plots has occasionally achieved positive artistic effects in her short stories collected in Ai-Ie hsiao t'ien-ti [A small world of sorrow and happiness] (1981). One best example is the frequently anthologized piece "Yeh-kuang-pei" [Jade cup that glistens at night] (1963), which, by focusing squarely on the chance element in life, manages to create a sense of irony reminiscent of Maupassant. 11 In sum, although works by writers of the older generation are not without artistic merit, their ideological outlook is deeply embedded in the conservative dominant culture of Taiwan's post-1949 era. The rise ofthe young Modernists, with their liberalism and new aesthetic conceptions, challenged not only these older writers' artistic visions, but also the dominant cul-

38 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

ture's ideological control over creative writers. The changes brought forth by the Modernists in the artistic realm, discussed below, formed the basis for more radical cultural critiques to be dealt with in later chapters of the present study.

New Artistic Formulations of the Modernists The Modernist literary movement created significant impact on contemporary Chinese fiction from Taiwan in both form and subject matter. In subject matter, the Modernists' endeavors to explore new spheres ofhuman experience beyond the confines oftraditionalist literature continued the efforts of their early-twentieth-century May Fourth predecessors and even surpassed them in depth.12 To comprehend and analyze the complexity of human experience in the modern world, they generally favored rationalism, scientism, and serious, if at times immature, philosophical contemplations. In form, since, as some scholars have recently observed, the attempts ofearlier modern Chinese writers to offer realistic portraits of life were frequently hampered by the dominance ofthe subjective voice in the work's rhetorical structure, the Modernists tried to redress this defiCiency by introducing a new "objective form." They were espeCially fond ofmanipulating narrative points of view to convey a relativistic view of morality. As such formal devices were primarily modeled on modern fiction of the West, writers from the Modern Literature group, being students of Western literature, naturally played a leading role. Commenting on fiction writers of the Modern Literature group, Pai Hsienyung, Wang Wen-hsing, Ou-yang Tzu, and Ch'en Jo-hsi, Leo Lee thus observed: "Judging from their early works, there is no doubt that all four of them demonstrated a stylistiC consciousness inspired by modern Western fiction. Wang Wen-hsing, in particular, was a conscientious, though not always successful, practitioner of style and form" (" 'Modernism'" 17). The radical experiments with language in Wang Wen-hsing's fiction will receive fuller treatment later. For a general understanding ofthe new narrative form that was introduced by the Modernists and widely assimilated by writers in Taiwan during the last three decades, no one serves as a better example than Ou-yang Tzu.

39 The Rise of the Modernist Trend

Ou-yang Tzu's total output of fictional work consists of less than a score of short stories written between 1960 and 1967, collected in Na ch'ang t'ou-fa te nii-hai [The girl with long hair] (1967).13 However, her focus on the aberrant social behavior and psychological crises of alienated individuals and her punctiliOUS observation of the technical rules of modern fiction as propagated by the literary departments in American academe has made her a pioneer of Taiwan's Modernist fiction. It is interesting to note that, according to au-yang herself, she was initially attracted to the lyrical-sentimental style. Among her favorite writers in her earlier days were Ping Hsin and Chang Hsiu-ya, who appropriately represented the May Fourth lyrical strand and the traditionalist prose of the 1950S. After attending the eye~opening lectures of Professor T. A. Hsia in her freshman year, however, she was converted to "modernist fiction." T. A. Hsia's well-taken criticism of the sentimentalist tendency in modern Chinese literature was rooted in intellectuals' reactions against aspects of the May Fourth style that had already become popular in the pre-Revolution years. 14 Thus, one may argue that Taiwan's Modernist literary movement is intricately linked with the New Literary tradition of Modern China. Under Hsia's influence, the Modernists were not only sensitized to the romantic idealization and sentimentalism of May Fourth literary writing, but they also proceeded to consolidate Western-influenced literary forms based on their knowledge of Anglo-American formalist theories, thus bringing to fuller realization these forms' internal dynamics. 1s As the technical prinCiples propagated by the Modernists played important roles in shaping the works of fiction produced in Taiwan since the 1960s, it is worthwhile to take a close look at au-yang's succinct run-down of these prinCiples in the preface to her short story collection The Girl with Long Hair (Na Ch'ang-tou-fa 1-4).

The preface starts with a firm denunciation of sentimentalism as the patent flaw of modern Chinese literature as a whole. Having identified the human psyche as the focus of her thematic interest, au-yang Tzu proceeds to postulate several technical rules to be followed in short story writing. Citing Henry James' scenic method and the Aristotelian "three unities," she stresses the key role played by "structure" in a literary work, apparently privileging dramatic presentation over authorial narration. Then, using ex-

40 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

amples from her own stories, she advocates economical use of language and advises avoiding hackneyed expressions and allusions. The plots of her stories, she maintains, are carefully trimmed of irrelevant details and are seldom built upon improbable coincidence. The remaining part of the preface concentrates on introducing the rhetorical technique of "objective narration." After asserting that the "tone" of the narration is the means through which the author conveys his or her attitude toward the subject matter and characters, she suggests that her attitude is mostly neutral and unbiased and that readers must not take the characters' point ofview as hers, nor should they think it represents the "correct" view. Finally, she illustrates this nonjudgmental stance of the author with one of her own stories, "Chin huang-hun shih" [As the dusk approaches] (1965), in which three accounts of the same story from different perspectives are juxtaposed, but none ofthem is completely right or wrong. Readers are asked to compare them carefully, using their own judgment, in order to "correctly uncover the truth of the matter" (Na ch'ang tou-fa 4). This preface implies that its author believes it is both pOSSible and desirable to present an impartial picture of reality so that readers may be given the privilege of forming their own opinions and moral judgments. These ideas are more reminiscent ofthe realists' concept of literary representation than the modernist view of literature as self-referential discursive practice. Throughout the 1960s, in fact, the majority of critical writings introducing Western literary concepts focused on basic technical rules and critical criteria that have long been naturalized and taken for granted in the West. Authoritative U.S.-trained scholars and critics such as Yen Yuan-shu, Chu Li-min, and Wai-lim Yip systematically expounded the fundamentals of a whole set of Western literary codes, and their influence on creative writing and practical criticism in Taiwan was immeasurable. Such a phenomenon is actually not very difficult to understand, given that literary genres of the short story and the novel (in the strict sense) have been imported from the West only in this century. That Chinese writers aspire to excel in these genres on their own terms and are eager to learn their original formal requirements is witnessed not only by writers of Taiwan in the 1960s but also by writers in the People's Republic of China in the 198os, when "modernist fiction" once again became fashionable. 16 It is also true, however, that the appropriation offoreign literary codes always goes beyond the mastery of basic techniques

41

The Rise of the Modernist Trend

and necessarily involves larger, more complicated netrTorks of artistic and ideological systems. One ofthe major arguments ofthe present study is that, in the Modernist literary movement ofTaiwan, a few dedicated writers have actually appropriated literary modernism at a deeper, ideological level and assumed aesthetic views that are far more complex than those set forth in Ou-yang's preface. This phenomenon will be the central focus of the third and fourth chapters. For the moment, my concern is with the more general impact of the technical principles introduced by the Modernists, which I will discuss from two angles: first, the establishment of a set of thematic conventions that supposedly incorporate advanced knowledge of human behavior made available by the modern sciences and, second, the replacement of older formal conventions by new ones, especially privileging the "objective" narratjve form in fiction writing.

The Psychological Paradigm A number of new Modernist themes came into fashion because of their broad appeal to young writers eager to explore the dark forest of human heart. However, as many writers of the 1960s were relatively sheltered middle-class college students, the tendency to substitute categories of abstract knowledge obtained from book reading for the actual observation of life was exceedingly strong. Apparently influenced by popular versions of Freudian psychoanalysis, Ou-yang was particularly fascinated with abnormal interpersonal relationships. Several ofher other stories have focused on the scandalous revelation ofan abnormal psychological trait. The mother in her "Mo-nu" [The bewitched woman] (1967), for example, is revealed in the end as a lifelong slave ofa possessive passion for her lover, which makes her incapable of any normal relations in life. The revelation shocks because she has successfully deceived everyone with the image of a loving mother. The young wife in "Wang" [Net] (1962) cannot marry her former lover because of a masochistic tendency shared by both: both parties are too eager to sacrifice, too sensitive to the other's feelings, so that they torment each other to an unbearable degree. Ou-yang was by no means the only writer that has demonstrated an interest in the abnormal. Most other young Modernists have written stories featuring imaginary post-Freudian middle-class spiritual dilemmas: WangWen-hsing's "Mu-ch'in" [Mother] (1960), for example,

42 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

deals with a psychotic mother who has an incestuous attachment to her teenage son; Pai Hsien-yung's "Hsiang-kang, 1960" [Hong Kong, 1960] (1964) tells the sad story ofa high-class woman refugee in Hong Kong who has degenerated to the most depraved form of sensuality and humiliated herself by taking a rascal as a lover; and the list goes on to include Shui Ching's "Meiyu lien te jen" [A man without face] (1962), Ch'en Ying-chen's "Wen-shu" [Documents] (1963), and many others. The Modernists' consciousness ofform and their treatment ofthe literary text as primarily self-referential were not fully developed until some time later. Works produced at the early stage ofTaiwan's Modernist literary movement, such as the ones mentioned above, were mainly conventional stories with unrealistic subject matter, too closely inspired by literary or nonliterary texts from Western sources. With her usual candor, Ou-yang admitted that "The Bewitched Woman" was adapted from an American television soap opera and that "As the Dusk Approaches" was written right after she completed a term paper on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. 17 From the historical point of view, such quaSi-psychological fiction is certainly not as enduring as the Nativist works that took contemporary life in Taiwan as their model. Nevertheless, from the point ofview oftechnical advancement, the Modernists must be given credit for haVing called attention to mechanisms involved in transforming raw material into art and thus preparing for more sophisticated formal innovations. Pai Hsien-yung has cited T. A. Hsia in asserting that "what to say" in a literary work is not as important as "how to say it." Wang Wen-hsing has even more aggreSSively contended that the writer should be solely concerned with how to manipulate the reader's response. The significance ofthese artistic conceptions must be comprehended in the proper context, namely, in view of their drastic departure from the more traditional expreSSive view ofliterature and narrative conventions. Whereas critics may accuse the Modernists of devoting too much energy to craftsmanship, to the extent that they have neglected the thematic content oftheir work, it may also be argued that the narrative paradigms ofpsychological fiction established during the early stage of the Modernist literary movement actually nourished such major works as the later novels of Wang Wen-hsing and Pai Hsien-yung with significant SOCiological implications. In a positive sense, vicarious knowledge about life acquired from translations ofWestern classics and the academic study of Existentialism and Freudian psychoanaly-

43

The Rise of the Modernist Trend

sis lent the Modernists vocabulary and conceptual frameworks for in-depth psychological exploration that were not readily available to modern Chinese writers before. Moreover, as any writer's fictional imagination necessarily reflects his or her private fantasies, which have roots in problems encountered in the process ofthe individual's socialization, even the artistically less mature works by the young Modernists reveal serious attempts by individual authors to come to terms with troubling psychological obsessions. In the work of Ouyang Tzu, for example, the disparity between one's self-image and a social persona seems to be a private concern repeatedly prOjected into dramatic moments ofgreat emotional intensity. Her "The Bewitched Woman," "Panko wei-hsiao" [HaIfa smile] (1960), and "Tsui-hou i-chieh k'o" [The last class] (1967) all center on a traumatic anxiety about the unexpected public exposure of one's private, ignoble thoughts. This motif is easily seen as a projection of the author's own latent fear, so that the compelling effect of Ouyang's much celebrated story "Hua-p'ing" [Flower vase] (1961), superficially about a madly jealous husband's struggle to overcome his inferiority complex with desperate schemes that were uncovered to his utter humiliation, may be interpreted as a masochistic enactment of a haunting nightmare. 1s Wang Wen-hsing's stories that deal with a boy's initiation into adult love, fate, sexuality, and mortality-such as "Ch'ien-ch'iieh" [Flaw] (1964), "Mingyiin te chi-hsien" [Lines of life] (1963), "Han-liu" [Cold currents] (1962), and "Jih-li" [Calendar] (I960)-invariably foreground an obsession with the existential "meaning" of life. Such obsession receives a more forceful treatment in his later work. Pai Hsien-yung, as C. T. Hsia has suggested, has borrowed literary idioms from Western classics to express intimate aspirations that spring from experiences of a personal nature. In the case of another fine Modernist writer, Shui Ching, the recurring motif of humiliation registers the author's sensitive response to an alienating social environment as well as a wish to reassert human decency in a modern world governed by values ofutility. Thus, if most early Modernist stories lack originality in thematic conception, they reflect certain highly personal realities of their authors' lives. Although such psychological exploration is rather commonplace and cannot be said to have offered powerful new interpretations, the young Modernists' sincerity and bold, honest self-analysis broke new ground in Tai-

44 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

wan's cultural context: such efforts have redefined boundaries ofnormality in human behavior and thus have presented challenges to conventional ethical prescriptions and the conservative middle-class mentality that have been the backbone ofthe dominant culture ofpost-I949 Taiwan. It is in this sense that the early Modernists have paved the way for the more radical cultural reexaminations found in works of the movement's mature stage.

The Ideal of Objectivity The most noteworthy formal feature popularized by the Modernists is the widened distance between author and text. In a sense, the Modernists' efforts to emulate Western modern fiction may be seen as having continued the general trend in modern Chinese literary history away from the traditional expressive view toward the mimetic view of literature. With their denunciation of sentimentalism and their express interest in the hidden complexities ofthe human psyche, personal emotions are no longer treated as the source or origin of literature, but rather as objects for detached observation.19 Having been immersed in sophisticated Western literary conceptions, the Modernists not only reject the simplistic notion that literary representation consists ofedited records ofeither personal experience or observed human activities, but also underscore the more abstract idea that writers "re-create" events based on universal laws governing human behavior. Thus, Ou-yang Tzu writes, "The content of my work usually depicts the kind of reaction a person may have under specific circumstances and the kind of choices he would make when confronted with certain dilemmas. That he reacts in a particular manner, makes a specific choice, has a definite reason, and this reason can be traced and inferred from his environment, his past, or his personality" (No ch'ang t'ou-fo 2). This clinical model offiction as case history naturally produces works substantially different from those still influenced by traditional artistic assumptions. Many scholars have pointed out that modern Chinese fiction writers, including such revered ones as Lu Hsiin, favored thematic closure because they felt the author is to some extent obliged to endorse expliCitly certain moral visions. The Modernists, however, consider any kind of expliCit didacticism an insult to the reader's imagination and constantly endeavor to

45 The Rise of the Modernist Trend

open up the narrative closure. One way is to stress the disparity between the author's and the characters' points ofview; au-yang Tzu thus feels the need to remind her readers that "the character's point ofview does not represent mine and is not necessarily correct" (Na ch'ang t'ou-fa 3). While insisting that a good piece of literary representation is nonjudgmental and "objective," the Modernists are fully aware that this objectivity is only an artistic pretense. True, stories should be allowed to unfold without the intrusive authorial presence and direct preaching, but every Single detail is still ultimately manipulated by the author, and the technical manipulation, mainly of plot and symbolism, has the final goal of effectively communicating specific messages. Although these messages cannot be characterized as moralistic in a superficial sense-since one major thematic import of the Modernist work is precisely to expose the relativity of conventional morality-they nevertheless always pertain to the moral sphere of human behavior. It is crUCially important to keep in mind that thematic indeterminacy and moral disinterestedness, which are characteristic of certain strands of Western modernism, are not prominent features ofworks by Taiwan's Modernists. Perhaps symptomatic of a consciously adopted rational worldview, many ofTaiwan's Modernists, at least in their early careers, have had a strong tendency to define objective representation in terms ofways in which factual information is released or mechanical processes by which the represented reality is unfolded in plot. They thus frequently appear to be rather insensitive to the "epistemological incertitude" that has been foregrounded in works ofearly Western modernists. I would like to illustrate this point with au-yang Tzu's story "As the Dusk Approaches." "As the Dusk Approaches" juxtaposes three different accounts of an intended murder resulting from a complex triangular relationship among three people-a young man in his early twenties Chi-wei; his soft-skinned, fair-looking friend Yii Pin; and his no longer young but still attractive mother, Li-fen. Yii has an affair with Li-fen but intends to leave for another city. After Yii discloses his decision to Li-fen, Chi-wei, who is waiting for him outside in the garden, has a quarrel with him and finally strikes Yii near his genitals with a carving knife. The reader is presented with three monologues, by Li-fen, Chi-wei, and Nanny Wang, a witness of the accident, offering three disparate versions of the story. t

46 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

Li-fen is bitter that another of her younger lovers has deserted her after learning from her the art of love, although, compared with her other lovers, Yii Pin seems to be more passive and lacking in passion. Her monologue also reveals that her life ofself-abandonment is a consequence ofthe trauma of her elder son's death at a young age. Feeling that recently Chi-wei has been watching her and Yii with "cold, hateful eyes," she is inclined to interpret Chi-wei's attempt to kill Yii as a gesture of hatred and revenge toward hersel£ Chi-wei's account discloses that instead ofresenting his mother for never having loved him, Chi-wei apparently has an Oedipus complex and has pleaded with Yii not to leave this lonely woman. He and Yii Pin were homosexual lovers before the affair. Yii apparently started the affair with Li-fen to prove that he could live a normal, heterosexual life, and Chi-wei seems to have been vicariously haVing a relationship with his mother through his friend Yii. His attempts to keep Yii from leaVing having failed, he again pleaded with Yii to "return to the old relationship." But Yii rejected both. Driven by despair and envy, Chi-wei apparently tried to castrate Yii rather than to kill him. In Nanny Wang's interpretation, Chi-wei was justified in trying to kill his best friend out of his indignation over the illicit love affair and as an attempt to protect his father's reputation. Her account prOVides extra details that confirm the reader's suspicions about Li-fen's narcissism-that she loved her eldest son because he inherited her beautiful features whereas Chi-wei resembles her husband. The story has apparently adopted the popular Rashomon device to drive home the message that reality has many phases.2o With this device, Kurosawa offers the philosophical inSight that the "truth" is forever lost in time, as a result ofthe impenetrable subjectiVity ofthe three speakers in the film who give different versions of the story. The fact that each of them "lies," either intentionally or involuntarily, is not merely a result of ignorance. Rather, such untruths are dictated either by self-interest or by egoism, convinCingly portrayed as universal human traits. Therefore, by stressing the ultimate inacceSSibility of truth to individual consciousness, the film intensifies the "existential anxiety" and conveys'a profound epistemological doubt. Although au-yang Tzu also stresses that everyone's interpretation of the episode was ineVitably conditioned by certain predispOSitions, the struc-

47 The Rise ofthe Modernist Trend

ture ofher story is actually that ofa detective story, in which the "true story" may be recovered as long as sufficient information is provided. In each of the three accounts, a partial picture is presented either because the narrator is ignorant of certain crucial facts or because the narrative account itself is elliptical. By drawing together the scattered clues, the reader can easily patch together a complete story, which is nothing less than "the truth of the matter." Ou-yang's belief in the existence of an original story reveals that she is more interested in the empirical process of storytelling than in the epistemological question involved in the human perception of reality or the narrative act itself Since unearthing this original story is all that is required to understand the cause and effect ofthe actions depicted, the reading process offers the reader intellectual satisfaction rather than provoking philosophical contemplation. The narrative device of Ou-yang Tzu, of course, serves its own thematic functions. Most of her stories, like the three individual pieces in "As the Dusk Approaches," are told from a Single narrative perspective, with a unitary linguistic consciousness-mixed points of view are consciously avoided, and alternative perspectives are introduced largely through other characters. This narrative device facilitates the presentation of Ou-yang's favorite theme, the self-deceiving, self-alienating individual confined by limited visions ofreality. This limitation, unlike the universally entrapping egoism in Kurosawa's film, is a pathological trait. Thus, although the actual contour of "reality" is hidden from a certain character's conscious knowledge, it is nevertheless readily accessible to other characters or to any uninvolved spectator. The dramatic effect of her stories thus comes from the tension between a known (or easily known) truth and the unenlightened individual blinded by specific, often excessive forms of psychological obsession. The author, as creator ofthe story, enjoys absolute power and does not seem to be bothered by the problems involved in the process ofgenerating meaning. The early Modernists have consciously invested narrative form with thematic implications and manipulated the narrative point of view. Though hardly a uniquely modernist concern, the correspondence between form and content has been so thoroughly explored by the Modernists that a new territory has been charted for Chinese fiction writers. In Family Crisis, for example, Wang Wen-hsing has communicated significant thematic messages through formal design-two intersecting story lines-and through

48 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

the deliberate confusion ofthe hero's and the narrator's points ofview. The extensive use of parallelism in the stories of Tales of Taipei Characters serves a key function in the author's construction of his elaborate symbolic system. To be sure, something remains slightly disturbing: as these writers take unusual fancy to dramatic plot creation, they have shown surprisingly little uneasiness about the author's arbitrary role in the act of literary representation, which must account for the inordinately mechanical quality of some oftheir plots. The same consciousness ofform eventually enabled the more ambitious Modernists to accomplish greater artistic feats, to create more "writerly" than "readerly" texts, and finally to veer away from the mimetic model and take the dichotomy between the literary text and its referent as a basis for more radical innovations.

Impact on the Literary Scene The thematic and formal conventions effectively disseminated by the Modernists have all but monopolized serious fiction writing in Taiwan since the 1960s; the new fictional form has thus considerably marginalized the more lyrical form ofprose writing. Even while prose writers from the same generation as the Modernists, such as Lin Wen-yiieh, Chuang Yin, Chang Hsiao-feng, Fang Yii, Wang Hsiao-lien, and others, more or less stay with the traditional style, the lion's share of creative talents are devoted to practicing the new type of fiction. Even in the case of more socially conscious writers who openly castigate the modernist ideology, such as Ch'en Jo-hsi, Ch'en Ying-chen, Huang Ch'un-ming, and Wang Chen-ho, the preference for dramatic presentation free from expliCit authorial intrusion and the predisposition to explain human behavior in terms of psychological motivations are commonly shared. The literary scene in Taiwan since the late 1970S has become increasingly pluralist, yet the overall impact of the Modernist literary movement is everywhere observable. Younger writers of the baby-boom generation, such as Li Ang, Tung-nien, Huang Fan, and Ku Chao-sen, have elaborated on the theme of conflict between the realization of individual values and conventional ethical norms, and are still marginally interested in themes involving the sense of being and existentialist anxiety. Even though, unlike the early Modernists, these younger writers no longer treat creative writing

49 The Rise of the Modernist Trend

as an "intellectual project," they have nevertheless thoroughly assimilated the literary techniques introduced by the Modernists, especially the "objectivity principle." In many cases, the structural refinement of their work surpasses even that of their predecessors and well deserves the label of "well-wrought urn." 21 Another notable impact ofthe development ofModernist fiction has been the polarization oftaste between the elitist and the popular, the modernist and the traditionalist. Although the Modernists for a decade or so contributed frequently to newspapers, as some of them developed stronger aestheticism, the gap between them and the general public widened. Although a group of baby-boom-generation writers had come to enjoy great popularity by publishing in the literary supplements ofnewspapers since the late 1970s, the serialization ofWang Wen-hsing's Backed Against the Sea in Chung-kuo shih-pao [China Times] at about the same time was discontinued because its "vulgar" language offended the sense of propriety of middle-class readers. The tension between the traditionalists and the Modernists is subtler and less publicly acknowledged. There is little doubt, however, that a fundamental disagreement on the criteria for literary excellence exists among the best critics from the two camps. Ou-yang Tzu, in a private conversation, mentioned a revealing incident: her freshman compOSition in the florid, sentimental style was heartily praised by her Chinese teacher but was met with scorn by Professor T. A. Hsia. The traditionalists' almost unanimous negative response to Wang Wen-hsing's Family Crisis and Backed Against the Sea, moreover, attests to this unbridgeable gap in literary taste.22 Such a bifurcation of critical opinions among qualified critics attests that an aesthetic reorientation has occurred in Taiwan's post-I949 literature as a consequence of the Modernists' appropriation of a new system of compOSitional and thematic conventions governing the production and reception of literary texts.

CHAPTER THREE

Appropriations of Literary Modernism The previous chapter has suggested that the Modernist literary movement produced significant changes in both rhetorical and thematic conventions of narrative prose in Taiwan, fundamentally transforming the artistic assumptions ofwriters and readers ofan entire generation. This chapter will further examine the specific ways in which Modernist writers have appropriated more characteristically modernist literary features. An ideal point of departure for this inquiry is the temporary surge of an "avant-garde" trend in the initial stage ofthe movement. Although for certain critics the Modernist literary movement is exclusively defined in terms of such radical subversions of literary form, as I shall demonstrate, the avant-garde trend in Taiwan has turned out to be both short-lived and inconsequential, to the point that the label "avant-garde" may be a misnomer. For the sake of convenience, however, I will continue to use the term, albeit in a qualified sense. The Romantic Avant-Garde Writers One prominent feature of the self-styled avant-garde writers of the 1960s was their infatuation with the intellectual current ofexistentialism. As Franz Kafka was introduced early in the movement, the use of obscure plots and bizarre language qUickly became a fad, and works by numerous young writers seemed to be dominated by nihilism, agonism, and an anxiety over the absurdity of existence.1 Predictably, readers and critics alike were at a profound loss about what these writers were trying to say; many of them complained feverishly about their unintelligibility and affectedness. Among

51

Appropriations of Literary Modernism

such negative critical responses, a piece of informed criticism has come from an overseas Chinese scholar, John Kwan-Terry. In his 1972 article "Modernism and Tradition in Some Recent Chinese Verse," Kwan-Terry offered a penetrating discussion of problems involved in the "modernist" poetry currently practiced in Taiwan. He maintained that the "modernist" poets' disdain for the "sense" of the poem not only resulted in a pathetic failure ofcommunication between poet and reader on the plane of reference, but also "threatened the breakdown of art." 2 Considering this phenomenon a result of fashion-seeking and blind worship of modern Western artistic trends, he expressed deep apprehension about a cultural crisis. By and large, the arguments posed in this essay applied to the fictional genre as well and seemed to articulate some widely shared opinions. The result was a heated debate on New Poetry, the "Hsin-shih lunchan" [New poetry debate], which was then followed by a more full-fledged antimodernist movement in the mid-1970S, the Nativist literary movement. The Nativist critics' forceful demand for social relevance and mass intelligibility in literature successfully stemmed the avant-garde craze for obscurantism in literary style. As writers were now considered spokespersons for the underprivileged and exploited class, tendentious works of social criticism proliferated, and technical deliberations were taken as indicative of a reactionary social attitude. Obscurantism was rejected and replaced by a deliberately uncouth style, purporting to simulate the rusticity of the less educated. In the new climate, some of the once ardent practitioners of the avant-garde style openly denounced their earlier works as decadent and politically incorrect. Although criticism of the pseudo-avant-garde was largely justified, the upsurge of "aesthetic iconoclasm" in the 1960s represented a significant moment in postwar Taiwan's literary history. The vigorous dynamics of newly introduced artistic conceptions associated with modernism called into question conventional forms and criteria of literary excellence. The more enduring efforts generated by this initial enthusiasm eventually ushered in a new era of modern Chinese literary history. It is precisely with reference to such revolutionary implications that Joseph Lau surveyed the phenomenon ofunconventional writings in 1973 in "The Concepts of Time and Reality in Modern Chinese Fiction," still one ofthe most perceptive critical overviews offiction ofthe period.

52 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

The works cited by Lau to exemplify the new trend t which he subsumed under the category of parabolic writing t may be further divided into two kinds. The first kind t represented by works of Chti-teng Sheng t Tstung Shut and Shih Shu-chting t may be appropriately called avant-garde because of their authors t deliberate "use ofanti-form or desecration ofestablished conventions U(Bradbury and McFarlane 30) and because themes ofthese works are usually obscure and defy rational analysis. The second kind t such as Wang Wen-hsingts "Tsui ktuai-Ie te shih [Happiness supreme] (1960) and Shui Chingts "Hi Lili Hi Li . . . t however t reveal a drastically different artistic conception and are written in lucid t ordinary language t with realistic settings and well-defined thematic messages. Although both kinds of works sufficiently depart from conventional literary practice t they contain seeds for developments in two different directions. The moral parables of the latter kind, on the one hand t with intellectually conceived goals of expressing visionary truth about "human nature/ t anticipated the broader allegorical tendency with which such Modernists as Pai Hsien-yung and Wang Wen-hsing constructed elaborate symbolic systems in their later works. The semantic ambivalence ofwritings ofthe first kind t on the other hand t turns out to be the product of speCific psychological motives that characterized the early phase of the Modernist literary movement. Chti-teng Sheng t who produced the largest amount of blatantly "obscure and bizarre writings during the 1960st illustrates this early phenomenon. H

H

u

Chti-teng Sheng began to attract critical attention with a series of sketches and vignettes that were published in the literary supplement of the Lien-ho pao [United daily news] and Modern Literature between 1962 and 1964. These writings are primarily based on his own life t skillfully rendered in a deliberately unsentimental style reminiscent of Hemingwayts stories with typically alienated heroes. His more characteristically "avant-gardeU writings were published between 1964 and 1972t in such collections as Chiang-chu [Quandary] (1969)t Ching-shen ping-huan [The mental patient] (1970)t Chii-hsieh chi [Giant crab] (1972)t and Lai-tao hsiao-chen te Ya-tzu-pieh [Ya-tzu-pieh who came to a small town] (1965). These later works may be further divided into two major types. One type of stories t consisting mainly of descriptions with minimal discursive elements t although filled with fantastic episodes and frequently lacking a coherent plott are appealing for their concrete images and

53 Appropriations of Literary Modernism

compelling immediacy. The other type of stories, however, typically contain lengthy philosophical deliberations, mostly expressed in the characters' interior monologues, but sometimes also in imaginary dialogues such as the conversation between the character Lao Tai and the statue of a deity in "Cheng-chih" [Quarrel] (1968).

Occidental Exoticism Joseph Lau once mocked Ch'i-teng Sheng's style as being inflicted with "infantile paralysis" ("Ch'i-teng Sheng" 39-41). True enough, judged by any critical standard, Ch'i-teng Sheng's language is replete with awkwardly distorted, Westernized syntax and unjustified semantic ambiguity. Nevertheless, it possesses a quaint impressionistic vividness and sonorous rhythm. With refreshing imagery, the stories often conjure up an enchanting atmosphere that has a speCial appeal for those predisposed to the novel and strange. Judging from the fact that several early critics of Ch'i-teng Sheng, such as Yeh Shi-t'ao, Kuo Feng, and Joseph Lau himself, have all compared Ch'i-teng Sheng's works with those of Kafka, Ionesco, and Pirandello, his unconventionality has been prOVisionally granted the status of aesthetic iconoclasm. As Renato Poggioli argued in The Theory of the Avant-Garde, speCific psychiC motives may be discerned in avant-garde iconoclasm, "which rarely limits itself to formal and aesthetic suggestions of the deformed and deforming vision (as in Modigliani) but transcends the sphere of art to affirm ... real impulses of agonism and nihilism" (181). It is precisely at the level of psychic motives that significant disparity exists between Western and Chinese avant-garde writers. On the part of Taiwan writers of the 1960s, the iconoclastic gesture and the refusal to use conventional forms were apparently not an effect of historical pessimism toward modern civilization; instead, they largely sprang from aspirations and frustrations of a highly personal nature. As many critics have pointed out, the young writers' rage for enigmatic art forms and the tendency toward nihilism were part of the cultural syndrome produced by Taiwan's isolation and stagnancy in years follOWing the Retreat. The egoistic rebelliousness that marked Ch'i-teng Sheng's work, espeCially his demands for unconditional individual freedom, is a product of this speCific cultural environment.3

54

Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

The influence on Taiwan's young intellectuals of Western avant-gardism and the new metaphysics popularized by existentialist philosophy may be compared to that ofneoprimitivism on the Western avant-garde writers at the beginning ofthe century. Both influences operated through the effect of exoticism. Poggioli has pointed out how neoprimitivist deformation, or the conscious replication of bizarre images from barbaric art, was used by the Western avant-gardists to desecrate the established artistic norms of Western civilization.4 In the cas~ of Taiwan's avant-garde writers, the appropriation of the principle of deformation, twice imitated and amply mixed with existentialist nihilism, may be said to have served a similar countercultural purpose. Ultimately, one may treat it as another manifestation of the same yearning for artistic freedom and individual self-fulfillment expressed in Family Crisis and Crystal BoYS.5 Nevertheless, while Wang Wen-hsing, Pai Hsienyung, and some other Modernists such as Ch'en Ying-chen and Lin Huaimin offered critiques on some Chinese experiences with the assistance of Western intellectual frames, the avant-gardists expressed their yearnings for alternative cultural values through imaginative creations based on foreign cultural images, which were largely inspired by an influx of Western texts into Taiwan in postwar years. Beneath the thin philosophical veneer is invariably a mass ofromantic exoticism. The well-known story "Yiieh-po te mo-i" [The last descendants ofJob] (I967?), by Shih Shu-ch'ing, for example, although superficially philosophical with its pretentious biblical allusions, has attracted attention primarily for its exoticism, as the readers ofthe story would not have been familiar with the metaphYSical framework of the Old Testament. Ch'i-teng Sheng, too, has energetically explored the effects of exoticism. In some works he mimicks the narrative tone and diction of popular translations of Western classics while adding a personal flavor. His settings are frequently strewn with objects utterly alien to the native landscape ofTaiwan and more likely to be found in nineteenth-century Europe such as stone statues, marble town halls, and Gothic churches. Even his fables are populated with foreign fairies rather than with Chinese celestials. Some of Ch'i-teng Sheng's characters have unusual names made up of words frequently used to transliterate foreign names, Western or Japanese. All these devices have a disorienting, alienating effect and go hand in hand with the author's efforts

55 Appropriations of Literary Modernism

to construct an imaginary cultural space that valorizes a moral context different from that familiar to Ch'i-teng Sheng and his readers. The critical consensus holds that Ch'i-teng Sheng's lifelong obsession has been the struggle against his own disadvantaged social position. Many of his stories reiterate the theme that an "artist"-male, self-centered, defiant, and creative, very much modeled on his own self-image-should be free from all constraints and practical concerns of life. As critics Kao Ch'iianchih and]oseph Lau have argued, such a willful, egoistic demand inevitably separates "me" from "them"-the latter being the entire society. Some of Ch'i-teng Sheng's early stories explicitly glorify unconventional behavior. In "T'iao-yiian hsiian-shou t'ui-hsiu Ie" [The champion long jumper has retired] (1968), for example, the aloof, antisocial, even diabolic persona is unconditionally exalted. Similarly, in such stories as "Fang-wen" [Visit] (1970) and "Ssu-kua pu" [Gourd dishcloth] (1971), the hero, in self-righteous indignation, condemns the corruption ofother characters without giving convincing evidence of his own moral superiority.

The Borrowed Existentialist Discourse Ch'i-teng Sheng's 1967 story "Wo ai Hei Yen-chu" [I love black eyes] offers an excellent example ofthe way the early Modernists appropriated existentialist themes from Western literature. The hero of the story Li Lung-ti has arranged to meet his wife Ch'ing-tzu in front of a movie theater. She is late, and they miss each other; when Li goes to her workplace, she has already left. On his way back, there is a sudden downpour, and the city streets are soon flooded. Showing a deep contempt for the people desperately trying to escape from the disaster, the hero selfishly pushes and steps over them as he begins to philosophize. In order to present the exact contours of the hero's mind-set, I will quote the work extensively: Tears came to his eyes. He thought indignantly, "How shameless people who fight for survival like this are. I'd rather stand here and cling to this pillar, and just die with it." ... He privately mourned that in this world ofnature death wasn't even worth mentioning. What harm, then, could human tribulation do to cold, unfeeling, Nature? Face to face with this invincible force of natural destruction, how would the values which

56 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

were a man's conviction and what he lived by achieve enduring existence? He was glad that the ill-defined faith that he had established in earlier days now turned out to be of use. It was helping him confront this frightful attack with fortitude. If in ordinary times he had been the type to fight for power and self-interest, how could he have endured seeing those things swept away now by natural forces? ... A man's existence, then, was the relationship between himselfand his environment in the here and now. Under these circumstances could he first identify himself, then love himself? Was he now coextensive with Godhead?6 (Lau, Chinese Stories 67) After righteously condemning everyone else and congratulating himselffor his aloofness, he finally climbs on a rooftop in order to assist a sick prostitute. The next morning at daybreak, although he discovers his wife Ch'ing-tzu on a rooftop close by, separated from them only by a gulf ofrunning water, he refuses to recognize her, but instead consoles the sick girl in his arms and feeds her the bread he has bought for Ch'ing-tzu. In response to Ch'ing-tzu's infuriated protests, the hero thinks to himself: You say I've betrayed our relationship, but under the circumstances how can we put it back together? The one thing that makes you angry isn't my betrayal, but the jealousy in your heart; you can't bear to see the rights you used to enjoy taken over by another. As for me, I must choose, and choose in the present situation. I must be responsible for what I live for, I didn't come into the world to reap its benefits for nothing. I must take up a duty which. would make me proud ofmy existence, no matter what. This gulf makes me feel that I'm no longer really your husband. Unless there comes a time when this gulf disappears-only then could I come back to you. May God have rnercy on you; you're in bad shape. (71) While the speaker of this passage sounds sufficiently self-centered for the reader to discount his argument, the philosophical support for this peculiar reasoning offered later is even more preposterously pedantic. Listening to Ch'ing-tzu on the other bank talking to herself about the past, the hero responds:

57 Appropriations of Literary Modernism

Yes, everyone had a past; pleasant or not, everyone had such experiences. But people often used past circumstances as the basis for making demands in the present, and when they didn't get what they asked for they were hurt, and felt bitter about it. Men were frequently shameless enough to keep deceiving the present with the past. Why was it that they couldn't look for a new meaning for living at each moment of the present? Life was like a stick of burning firewood: although the ashes at the burning end still retained the outward shape of the wood, it couldn't stand being touched, nor could it burn again; only the other end was firm and bright. (72) The philosophical notion of an existential gap between a person's past and present seems to have fascinated many young Modernists in Taiwan (Ch'en Ying-chen, for instance, in the 1967 story "Ti i-chien ch'ai-shih" [My first case] used an image very similar to the torch in this passage to convey the theme of temporality)? but Ch'i-teng Sheng's use of this existentialist concept as the basis for the individual's moral choice appears strained. The doomsday catastrophe is another frequent motif in existentialist literature. Indeed, the catastrophe scene immediately recalls God's punishment of human beings in biblical stories, and it also symbolizes the cruelty ofan unfeeling nature. The device ofplacing the individual in extreme conditions as in natural disaster enables the writer to question ethical norms and assumptions whose validity in ordinary life is taken for granted. However, loopholes in Ch'i-teng Sheng's plot and his protagonist's reasoning have weakened this thematic function. Despite the hero's assertion that crucial change has been brought about by the flood, the disaster is not presented as plaUSibly insurmountable. The fact that the flood actually recedes the next day and there is a lifeboat rescuing people makes the hero's insistence on the "impaSSible gulf" between the two rooftops seem forced. To be sure, Ch'i-teng Sheng would probably dismiss this flaw, if it were pointed out to him. For, it seems that the gulf is in all likelihood a convenient excuse; what has severed the tie between the hero and his wife comes from a highly subjective, arbitrary definition of "present responSibility" and personal dignity, an obsessive moral question that has been haunting the hero all along. His choice ofnot recognizing his wife is a result of idiosyncratic reasoning,

58 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

which is a logical development of his melancholic mood and habit ofphilosophical meditation already established at the beginning of the story. His weird beliefthat his moral responsibility toward a stranger "at the present" should temporarily nullify marital obligations does not, then, represent a natural human response under unusual circumstances but is the self-willed action of an idealist who devises his own heroic code. The high-sounding philosophical justifications merely prOVide an excuse for romantic elevation of the self and egoistic self-assertion. The critical response to "I Love Black Eyes" is interestingly divided. C. H. Wang, on the one hand, affirms the hero's capacity for compassion at the risk ofdeviating from the ethical norms through a symbolic reading, envisioning the hero's world as a contesting ground for "fantasy" and "reality." Defending the hero, Wang says, "Ch'ing-tzu, separated by the gulf, was merely a notion in his fancy, and was no longer capable of competing with the prostitute in her husband's arms" (199). So the hero "chose to protect the sick prostitute at the cost of the loss of his own wife because it was the only realistic, honest way through which he could demonstrate his moral power" (201). True, the only way to accept the hero's rationalization at face value is to read the story not realistically but symbolically as a battle of conflicting forces. The majority of critics seem to have taken a realistic approach and faulted the hero for his thinly disguised egoism. Kao Ch'iian-chih andJoseph Lau ("Ch'i-teng Sheng"), moreover, have identified the dilemma ofthe hero and a number of Ch'i-teng Sheng's other main characters with the author's headstrong endeavor to aggrandize the profession of artist in total neglect of the individual's function in a normal society.

The Romantic Celebration of the Artistic Ego In the late 1970s, Ch'i-teng Sheng, at a more mature age, finally stepped forward to carve his own public image. Since then he has written about himself extensively in prefaces, afterwords, and chronologies attached to his publications.8 The biographical information disclosed in these writings inCidentally revealed that some of the wildly fantastic, enigmatic scenes in Ch'i-teng Sheng's early stories were based on actual events dressed up with some imaginary details. One may of course be disappointed by their lack of genUinely creative artistic reformulation. Yet they demonstrate that, in a

59 Appropriations of Literary Modernism

literal sense, Ch'i-teng Sheng has taken his own life as his primary object of observation. T'ang Wen-piao, an amateur critic who ignited the Nativist literary movement in 1973, insightfully suggested that since Ch'i-teng Sheng "has so subjectively projected himself into every single work of his, we may simply take everyone of them as an autobiography" ("Yin-tun" 185). The idiosyncratic "avant-garde" style, therefore, is revealed to be motivated not so much by a modernist skepticism about language and form as by a preoccupation with romantic self-portraiture. In his later works, Ch'i-teng Sheng has more directly registered his capricious temper, sudden bouts of melancholy, uncontrolled malice against what has wronged him personally, and a not-so-sincere disdain directed at the masses. In stories collected in Sha-ho pei-ko [The sad music from Sandy River] (1976), San-pu ch'ii Hei-ch'iao [Strolling to the Black-bridge] (1978), Yinpo ch'ih-pang [Wings over the silver waves] (1980), and Lao fU-jen [The old lady] (1984), he discarded the earlier, bizarre style and adopted more conventional forms. Then, after a period of "self-examination," he published T'anlang te shu-hsin [Love letters from T'an] (1985) and Ch'ung-hui Sha-ho [Return to Sandy River] (1986), which consist ofeloquent letters and diary entries. Since then Ch'i-teng Sheng has openly used unedited biographical materials and has written about personal experiences involving other celebrities in literary circles. Although ethical problems inevitably arise in Ch'i-teng Sheng's works and the author's philosophizing habit at times becomes annoying, there are also moments ofgenuine eloquence. The influence ofWhitmana writer Ch'i-teng Sheng deeply admired at a young age-has finally been driven home. In his competent treatment of romantic subjects, such as the celebration of the ego, the confession of private eccentricities and fluctuations ofmoods, and the sensitive appreciation ofnature, a classic Romantic seems to have emerged. C. H. Wang, a brilliant poet himself, has even compared "Strolling to the Black-bridge" with prose poems of Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (103). The angry young man who employed the "avant-garde" style as a weapon to criticize upperand middle-class values has become the tranquil Romantic. Though not every writer of the avant-garde style shared Ch'i-teng Sheng's romantic vision ofthe all-important ego, it has nevertheless been common for writers to use the pseudo-avant-garde style to exoticize their personal

60 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

experiences. Shih Shu-ch'ing professed a youthful craving for adventure, lamenting the fact that she was "born in a peaceful age ... too late to witness the war" ("Na-hsieh" 182-197). Li Ang argued that her experimental stories ofthe late 196os, though fantastic in appearance, were based on actual occurrences in her exotic hometown, the city of Lu-kang (Hua-chi 2-3).9 The fact that the avant-garde style served primarily as a vehicle for vicarious adventures for young writers of the sixties with exuberant imaginations prompts an intLrest in exploring more serious aesthetic issues. Commenting on the avant-garde in the West, Poggioli says: The linguistic hermeticism, which is one of the avant-garde's most important characteristics of form and style, would be conceived of as both the cause and the effect of the antagonism between public and artist. The problem of obscurity in so much contemporary poetic language is furthermore understood by many modern critics as the necessary reaction to the flat, opaque, and prosaic nature of our public speech, where the practical end of quantitative communication spoils the quality of expressive means. According to this doctrine, the linguistic obscurity of contemporary poetry should exercise a function at once cathartic and therapeutic in respect to the degeneration affecting common language through convention and habits. The quasi-private idiom of our lyric poetry would then have a social end, would serve as a corrective to the linguistic corruption characteristic of any mass culture. (37) Peter Biirger, in his recent book on avant-gardism, however, argues that such features are not exclusively avant-garde, but are already characteristic of such earlier trends in the nineteenth century as symbolism and aestheticism, which later evolved into modernism proper. In Biirger's perception, the avant-garde movement in the early part of the century should more appropriately be seen as an inevitable consequence of the intensification of the aesthetic tendency, which drove artists to make radical attempts to reintegrate art into practical life. The avant-garde style as practiced by the Taiwan writers served none of these purposes. Although these writers may have found themselves tempted to assume the posture of a surrealist, a dadaist, or an artist of other avantgarde trends, they have done so mainly because ofthe attraction ofan exotic

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flair, or, more important, because such a posture always signifies progressiveness. In the historical development of modern Chinese literature there was no well-developed aestheticism prior to the 1960s (the sophisticated aestheticism in traditional Chinese literature has not been a viable artistic trend in the modern period), and the newly awakened skepticism toward language and the relation between form and content has yet to be fully absorbed. The willful playing with language and imagery and the departure from established conventions are therefore often accompanied by a defiant gesture protesting the totalizing tendency of the society, while sanctioning individual self-fulfil.lment (a similar observation can be made about the writings ofPRC writers Liu So-la, Hsii Hsing and Ts'an-hsiieh in the 1980s). Joseph Lau is right in repeatedly emphasizing that the literary trends in Taiwan in the 1960s were indirect, distorted reflections of sensitive young artists' reactions to a stifling sociopolitical atmosphere. That a number of such writers, such as Ch'en Ying-chen and Ch'enjo-hsi, soon realized the inefficacy ofthis indirect protest and shifted to more realistic forms ofwriting to criticize the same cultural conditions not only confirms Lau's point, but also exposes the shallowness ofthe avant-gardist influence in these writers' artistic conceptions. With his obsessive concern with the artist's role in society and his romantic beliefin the spontaneous overflow ofpersonal emotions, Ch'i-teng Sheng has in fact endorsed an essentially expressive view of literature. He once refuted an editor's suggestions for his grammar in the following words: "It so happens that I do not care about the so-called correctness of grammar; when I am writing fiction, I try to follow the images and the ideas closely with intensive concentration, and to be fastidious about grammar at such a moment is simply improper." 10 By the 1980s, many of the early practitioners of the avant-garde style had become socially engaged writers, actively interacting with the public through more conventional narrative forms. The ease with which they gave up their linguistic hermeticism proves that there has never been a serious antagonism between the public and these artists. Other writers, however, were more deeply wakened to the prosaic quality of the "language of the market" during the Modernist literary movement. Such writers as Wang Wen-hsing, Li Yung-p'ing, and Wang Chen-ho, by rigorously experimenting with style and, in particular, by trying to enrich fictional language with sensuous detail, developed an aestheticism in an un-

62 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

qualified sense ofthe term. Their views oflanguage significantly depart from the conventional expressive view that seems to underlie Ch'i-teng Sheng's literary career. Before discussing these more ambitious endeavors in the final section ofthis chapter, however, I will first call attention to some more rudimentary influences literary modernism has exerted on Taiwan's fiction writers.

Conscious Explorations of Language and Voice In a 1926 essay on the dominant currents in contemporary Chinese literature, Liang Shih-ch'iu, a liberal scholar of considerable stature at the time, expressed his reservations about foreign influences. He argued that Chinese writers' inordinate enthusiasm for foreign literary modes was fundamentally a "romantic" tendency, a result of their eagerness to break away from and pump new blood into worn-out and enfeebled native traditions. This enterprise, however, lacked a solid foundation and would eventually be abandoned: "The foreign influences, once introduced, immediately prevail with an irresistible force, and their merits and weaknesses are equally honored. The result, then, is ineVitably disorder, or even chaos, even though beneath this chaos is usually an extremely lively vital spirit. This disorderly condition will not sustain itselffor long; when its dynamism wears out, everything will again be resting on a solid basis" (4-5). Such skeptiCism toward indiscriminate acceptance of anything foreign was undoubtedly shared by many, but Liang was equipped with a theory that advised the adoption of a "classical spirit" to counterbalance romantic excess: "The 'classical' is what is healthy, for it purports to maintain balance in each component part of the whole; the 'romantic' is what is abnormal, since its essence lies in unrestrained developments ofthe abnormal. For example, feeling and imagination are both essential elements of literature; if they can be controlled by rationality and receive full development without departing from the norm, then we have the classical. If, however, feeling and imagination each develops in its own path for the purpose of creating the extraordinary effect ofwonder, then, it may be called romantic" (232-233). As a Harvard-trained scholar, Liang wrote about literature with close reference to the Anglo-American literary tradition. To some extent, his views represented the liberal mainstream among Chinese literary scholars and

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carried considerable weight in the literary circles ofpost- 1949 Taiwan. Liang himself taught at National Normal University until retirement; influential younger scholars, such as T. A. Hsia, Chu Li-min, and Yen Yiian-shu, all by ;Iud large shared the same intellectual bearing. Even as literary modernism, another foreign-influenced literary trend, assumed the status of a strange new god, these scholars unmistakably favored the "classical" strand ofWestern modernism. T. S. Eliot, for example, was probably the most respected Western modernist. Given such an intellectual climate, it is easy to understand why writers from the Modern Literature group, in an attempt to achieve a classical control of literary form, placed great emphasis on reason rather than emotion, on the intellect rather than sentiment. Even the radical individualism of such an iconoclastic writer as Wang Wen-hsing is most closely tied to an inordinate faith in rationality. It is also not surprising that these writers have, generally speaking, avoided exoticism, existentialist agonism, and various "avant-garde" antiforms. They have instead demonstrated a more intellectual concern with the theoretical issues involved in narrative representation, with language, voice, and point of view. With respect to the Modernists' experimentation with language, too much attention has been paid by critics to the stream-of-consciousness technique, which apparently represents a conspicuous departure from conventional narrative modes. The Chinese writers' appropriation ofthe stream-ofconsciousness technique is for the most part slaVishly imitative rather than innovative. In his book The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in Ulysses, Erwin R. Steinberg pointed out that as logical, single-directional, linear language is an inadequate medium for representing the unorganized, multidirectional mental activities Simultaneously taking place in the psyche, new sets of narrative conventions have to be created. Such linguistic features as unpunctuated run-ons, truncated sentences, fragmented syntax, and juxtaposition ofunrelated details are then used in stream-of-consciousness literature to simulate the unmediated visual impressions, random associations, and abrupt shifts in one's train of thought. However, if one looks at the oftencited works by Taiwan's Modernists that contain stream-of-consciousness passages, works such as Shui Ching's "A Man Without Face," Wang WenhSing's "Mother," and Pai Hsien-yung's "Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream," it is evident that their authors merely mimicked the de-

64 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

vices that had already been standardized and normalized in Western literature. Although these writers appropriated the techniques with considerable competence, and the outcome usually served the artistic purposes of individual works well, such an appropriation showed no sign of the essential modernist spirit of experimentation and innovation.

"Impersonal Narration" and Single Language Consciousness Violations of established formal conventions, imitated or not, call attention to some basic facts about literary representation that have been so far taken for granted. In particular, the Modernists' attention was attracted to the mimetic literary concept that presumes a disjunction between fictional discourse and the referential world. The first, most enduring efforts made by the Modernists therefore largely revolved around technical maneuvers directed toward the preservation ofthe realistic illusion in fiction. The early Modernists energetically promoted "impersonal narration," with a subdued authorial presence and minimally mediated narration and description, in order to achieve a higher degree of verisimilitude. In this type of narrative, by virtue ofthe inherent disparity between the point ofview ofthe "implied author" and that ofthe characters, an effect of irony is usually achieved, and this effect has been regarded a hallmark trait of Modernist fiction. ll Theoretically speaking, the term "impersonal narration" is necessarily a qualified concept, a technique valorized by specific conventions ofmodern Western fiction. Even Wayne Booth and Seymour Chatman, scholars who were themselves responsible for promulgating such terms as "impersonal narration" and "overt" and "covert" narrators, remind us that, strictly speaking, "impersonal narration" is a practical impOSSibility and that all narrative types inevitably contain "mixed points of view," owing to the connotative ranges of individual words and the inherently ambiguous nature of personal deictics in narrative discourse. Bakhtin, working primarily with the nineteenth-century European novel, confronted this issue from a different angle. His theory ofdiscourse suggests that what characterizes novelistic discourse is precisely its resistance to the monopoly of either purely personal or purely impersonal voices. Even the most unitary and direct authorial discourse, which would be closest to the condition of "impersonal narration," is fused with "another's speech"-another's voice, another's accent,

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another's point ofview-through the workings of "internal dialogism" and through "character zones" as well. The discourse in artistic prose is therefore always "polyphonic".12 As the Modernists in Taiwan were deeply influenced by Anglo-American rhetorical theories, they made a big issue of how to secure ideal conditions for unmediated, "impersonal" narrative transmission. The most purist attempts made in this direction are found in Ou-yang Tzu's work. She is said to have deliberately shunned ornate, colorful diction. Aclose inspection ofher short stories reveals a rigorously maintained consistency in narrative perspective-her stories are mostly told from a single perspective, and voices other than that of the narrator are only allowed to enter the story through represented inner speeches and dialogues among the characters. Ou-yang's fastidious efforts to eliminate, or at least put under control, the interplay of different voices presuppose the ultimate desirability ofmaking the language offiction a transparent medium for narrative representation, unobstructed by the subjective feelings of the narrative agent. As a consequence of such meticulous control, the intractable effect of heteroglossia, which Bakhtin sees as the source of the essential dynamiCS of fictional discourse, is natu~ally weakened or domesticated. At the same time, the author transfers her energy to plot and action, and thus frequently attains a heightened dramatic intensity. Indeed, most ofOu-yang's stories excel in conveying heightened dramatic tension. The restrictive effect ofthe "single language consciousness" ofOuyang's fictional discourse is not as devastating as it could be. Since she is mainly interested in the psychological drama of the educated middle class, her characters share many of the linguistic habits of the narrator, and the plain, "ordinary" language used in the narration is easily carried over to speech representing the voices ofthe characters. Generally speaking, however, the widened distance between author and text allows not only more dramatic presentations but also communication ofthematic messages through multiple channels. Evert with such a writer as Huang Ch'un-ming, who is allegedly "immune" to certain prominent modernist influences, the imprints ofsuch a technical concept are obvious. In th~ seemingly natural and straightforward narrative discourse ofHuang's stories that vividly capture the linguistic habits ofthe country folk, for example, the author nevertheless displays great dexterity in the manipulation ofnarrative

66 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

perspective, which stays within the sphere of impersonal narration but is free from the rigidity of Ou-yang Tzu. The natural shifts between overt and covert narrative voices in Huang's stories create an intimacy between the narrator and the hero, in sharp contrast to the estrangement effected by Ouyang Tzu's narrative method. In Huang's works the distance between the author and the text permits the ingenious use ofsection subtitles to convey sarcasm. The interplay ofsuch subtitles with the content of a story gives his works an extra thematic dimension.

The "Arbitrary Narrator" and the Undermining of Realistic Illusion If Ou-yang Tzu's faithful adherence to the principle of "impersonal narration" appears conservative and recalls a dated practice in the West, there are also writers who were more attracted to the latest aesthetic trends around the world, such as those found in works of late modernism. Such works often take to task the realistic conventions of narrative fiction and are no longer as concerned with either the "context" or the "text" of the literary work as with the narrative "code," the very process of storytelling. To the extent that the use of an "arbitrary narrator" by Wang Chen-ho often deliberately undermines the realistic illusion, it may be considered as exhibiting the same kind ofexperimental spirit. In contrast to the self-effacing narrator of the impersonal narration found in the majority of the fiction of the Modernists, the intrusive narrator in Wang Chen-ho's stories usually calls attention to itselfthrough a distinctive mocking voice, parenthetical authorial comments, and other kinds of derisive remarks. What is more, Wang Chen-ho at times seems to toy with the paradox ofthe act ofnarrative transmission. My favorite example ofWang's "modernistic" idiosyncrasy is his uncanny story "Wu-yiieh shih-san chieh" [The thirteenth of May festival] (1967). The story is unexpectedly given a surreal cast when two separate events are narrated nearly verbatim with almost identical details. Two different customers visit a toy shop run by an old couple, one in the morning when the husband is keeping the store and the other in the afternoon when only the wife is present. Curiously, the words used to represent the two scenes are almost identical-not only do the conversations taking place closely resemble each other, but so does the

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narration itself-as if the narrator were suddenly captured by a capricious desire for self-mimicry. The liberty Wang takes with his narrative manner foregrounds the fictionality of his fiction and undercuts the realistic illusion that a writer like Ouyang Tzu painstakingly tries to preserve. This arbitrariness of Wang's technique becomes more obtrusive in a few of his later works, such as "Su-Ian hsiao-chieh yao ch'u-chia" [Miss Su-Ian wants to get married] (1976), "Chimo hung" [The lonely redness] (1963,1971), and "Hsiang-ko-li-Ia" [Shangri-la] (1979), when he employs devices that recall Tristram Shandy, ranging from typographical variations-enlarged or boldface print, for instance-to textual insertions from other genres. In one case the narrator suddenly switches to verse in the middle of a narrative; several other times he inserts a piece of dialogue in the form of a script; occasionally the author prOVides explanations for obscure dialectical expressions, musical scores for a song that the characters have sung, or a chart to explain the details ofthe income and expenses of the family in a story. In another story he places a large empty square in the middle of the page to represent the part being omitted in his narration. Such occasional anomalies in the narration of Wang's stories, which may be taken as lighthearted tampering with the author-reader relationship, had a conspicuously "metafictional" effect long before postmodernist, metafictional devices such as multiendings became a fad in Taiwan. Wang does not follow any set patterns; he is quite free in adopting whatever unconventional techniques suit his whim with a spirited playfulness. Although the experimental energy thus exhibited seems "modernistic," the lack of an aesthetic end frequently diminishes the value of Wang's innovations. Nonetheless, the fact that such devices no longer take for granted a stable relationship between the text and referential reality seems to anticipate the more systematically conceived experiments of the aestheticists.

Development of Language Consciousness: the Conscious Incorporation of Various "Speech Genres" If attempts to confirm or challenge established narrative conventions are necessary consequences ofthe writers' consciousness ofa widened distance between author and text, there is another important dimension in which

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the Modernists explore this distance to enhance artistic effects, namely, the incorporation of a diversity ofvoices in narrative discourse. As Bakhtin has pointed out, each speech type, or speech genre, artistic or extraartistic, "possesses its own verbal and semantic forms for assimilating various aspects of reality" (321). The individual voices incorporated in artistic prose therefore represent particular ways of viewing the world, and the presence of multiple voices broadens the conceptual horizon of artistic discourse (321). Such conscious efforts have helped the Modernists to move even further away from traditional narrative discourse, which usually features a dominant authorial presence. That Pai Hsien-yung is often considered a masterful stylist has a great deal to do with his colorful presentation ofa chorus ofdistinctive voices, ranging from the dignified conversations between a four-star general and his secretary to the bawdy vulgarities of the whoremaster, in his best-known work, Tales of Taipei Characters. As the son of one of the most illustrious generals in the history of the Republic of China, Pai enjoyed a unique advantage in observing people from various social groups. His tales are thus populated with people from many sociolinguistic groups. Even though Pai's talent for mimicking different voices is not exceptional (some ofthe dialogues in Tales and especially in Crystal Boys are rather unnatural), the dialogic interplay between the juxtaposed voices and disparate worldviews creates a dynamic that is rarely found in the works of his peers. One example is the brilliant use of the double-voiced narrator in the opening story of Tales, "Yung-yiian te Yin Hsiieh-yen" [The eternal "snow beauty"] (1965). The narrator's adoption of a voice from high-society gossip Simultaneously creates an enviable image of leisure, comfort, and gentility and communicates a bleak vision of moral decay and doom. The splendor of the decadent world of Taipei's Shanghainese exiles is constantly undermined by a matter-of-fact account of what history has in store for these characters. A more broadly used technique that involves active exploration of voice is the employment ofthe Taiwanese dialect, generally thought to have been initiated by Wang Chen-ho. Although this device was apparently conceived to reflect reality, it also prOVides a powerful means of representing underprivileged social groups through the successful rendering of the language used by Taiwan's peasants and country folk. For this reason, this artistic feature has been exploited, stigmatized, and abused alternately, as Nativists

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used it to sharpen readers' perceptions ofthe sociolinguistic differentiation in society, and numerous epigones made a fetish of it for no other reason than that it stood for the latest literary fashion. 13 The incorporation of speech types and speech genres of course goes beyond the appropriation of voices of special sociolinguistic groups in the simple mimetic sense. The concept of "speech genre," according to Bakhtin, refers not only to types of living social speech (nonartistic genres) but also to texts that are mainly written (artistic genres). The Modernists' conscious appropriation ofspeech genres from existing literary texts played a notable role in shaping their individual styles and attests to the complex dynamics ofthe cultural and ideological forces that have forged their literary projects. It is often mentioned that Pai Hsien-yung's language is heavily influenced by that of Dream of the Red Chamber. Whereas most of Pai's generation grew up reading translations of foreign literature, Pai benefited from early exposure to traditional Chinese novels in childhood, and it is readily discernible that the fictional discourse in Tales of Taipei Characters is greatly enriched by the narrative style and descriptive vocabulary of vernacular fiction. To cite an obvious example, the gorgeous liVing-room setting in his famous story "Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream" is presented with the fast-paced enumeration ofselected details ofthe decor and the costumes of the characters that is frequently found in traditional novels. The spectacular atmosphere offestivity, the image of a mundane storyteller who comments on the life and death of his characters with involved detachment, and the passive worldview that ultimately submits to the caprice of fate all readily evoke associations with old China. Thus the nostalgiC image of the past is not a realistic recreation but a textual product heavily relying on the narrative conventions of traditional fiction. Such a style in Tales of Taipei Characters brings out Vividly its preSiding theme ofthe rapidly fading cultural ambience of the past.14 The use of peculiarly long and convoluted sentences and redundant sentence-ending particles in the early stories of another writer, Ch'en Yingchen, suggests an appropriation ofJapanese syntax. The style is visibly influenced by the Japanese aesthetic, with its characteristic melancholy as well as a romantic fascination with sensuality. Ch'en's well-known stylistic appropriation of literature of the May Fourth period and the thirties, most evident in such early stories as "Mien-fan" [The noodle stall] (1959) and

70 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

"P'ing-kuo shu" [The apple tree] (1961), betrays an ideological motive, as Ch'en was apparently attracted by the leftist humanitarianism that dominated these periods. Although the opening passage of "The Apple Tree" and the romantic song in the story are vested with a delicate nostalgic beauty, it is preposterous that the Taiwanese father in "The Noodle Stall," a native of Miao-li, addresses his customers with the polite word nin in Northern Chinese dialect. Ch'en's replacing ta (she) in standard modern Chinese with the more archaic i because the latter appeared frequently in pre- 1949 literature seems equally obtrusive. In all fairness, however, this attempt to recapture the past through linguistic means does help to create a distinctive personal style, one marked with a peculiar sentimentality that is appealing to some but "embarraSSing" to others.15 Although these writers' deliberate appropriation of an older or a foreign style is primarily thematically motivated, there are also writers who explore this technique with more purely literary effects in mind. Wang Chen-ho, for example, frequently mixes high and low dictions to create a mock-heroic, parodiC effect. In several of his short stories he deliberately juxtaposes quoted lines from well-known classical poems that depict exalted sentiments with descriptions of vulgarities, notably in "K'uai-Ie te jen" [A happy person] (1964). Wang Wen-hsing, too, in an allegorical story about the Nationalist-Communist civil war, "Lung-t'ien lou" [Dragon tower] (1964-1965), appropriates a number ofspeech types found in earlier literary texts, ranging from traditional Chinese novels to Western classics, to form a mock-epiC style with a touch of black humor. In one episode of the story, for example, the brigade commander's neighbor delivers a lofty speech, in a rhetorical style recalling a Shakespearean play or a Greek tragedy, to relate how the commander's family has herOically resisted and then been brutally killed by the enemy. The apparently intentional exploration ofthe technique of stylistiC parody anticipates the more successful language in Wang's later novel Backed Against the Sea. To demonstrate that the Modernists' studious cultivation of a consciousness of language has in fact distinguished their works from the bulk of Chinese fiction written in the pre-Revolution period and in the contemporary People's Republic, I would like to offer a careful analysis of a much-celebrated short story by Wang Chen-ho: "Chia-chuang i niu-ch'e" [An oxcart for dowry].16 Even at an early stage ofthe Chinese writers' appropria-

71

Appropriations of Literary Modernism

tion of Western fictional forms, attempts at manipulating narrative voice, through irony and the use ofunreliable narrators, for example, were impressive. Such stories as Lu Hsiin's "Ah Q cheng-chuan" [The true story ofAh Q] (1921) and "K'ung I-chi" (1919), and Wu Tsu-hsiang's "Kuan-kuan te pu-p'in" [Young master gets his tonic] (1934 or 1935) are only the better-known examples. Nevertheless, when it comes to sophisticated artistic reformulation of speech types and individual voices, the pre- 1949 Chinese writers cannot compare with some of the best fiction writers in Taiwan. "An Oxcart for Dowry" provides a good example. In a sense, Wang may be described as a master of "heteroglossia," or the dialogical interaction between different speech genres within the text, as defined by Bakhtin. As Bakhtin says, "All languages ofheteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points ofview of the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values" (292). In "An Oxcart for Dowry," the artistic reformulation of language foregrounds socioideological assumptions and thus forms an integral part of the story's thematic dimension. The story is about a poor villager named Wan-fa, who, because of a hearing problem, finds it hard to keep his family from starving with his job as an oxcart driver. Then a clothes vendor, Chien, moves in as a new neighbor and has an affair with Wan-fa's wife. Chien also provides much-needed financial help by hiring their son in his business. While struggling to save his own sense of self-respect at the expense of an empty stomach, the ill-fated Wanfa is unexpectedly imprisoned for accidentally killing a child. After being released from prison, he finally must accept the fact that Chien's relationship with his wife is the only means left for his family to survive. Once a week he swallows humiliation along with a bottle of beer that Chien gives him and lets Chien and his wife spend the evening together. Ironically, with money from his wife's adulterer, Wan-fa becomes able to fulfill his lifelong dream of owning an oxcart for himself. Unlike the humanitarian stories of the thirties, the perennially impoverished villagers in this story are portrayed as rather unlikable, each with a special physical defect. Wan-fa is nearly deafbecause during the war he once bathed in unclean water and was unable to find a good doctor. He is, moreover, laughably cowardly in his pathetiC struggle to maintain his dignity.

72 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

Wan-fa's wife Ah-hao is exceptionally ugly, with a chest like a washboard; she loves to gamble and is unpleasantly garrulous. The adulterer Chien has a bad odor and is constantly scratching his armpits. The author's humanitarian message, therefore, is conveyed not by appealing to the reader's sympathy with innocent, positively portrayed victims, but mainly through ingenious devices at the discursive level. Throughout the story, the mischievous, double-voiced narrator exuberantly uses witty aphorisms and proverbial phrases to mock and ridicule the wretched conditions of his characters; for instance, he calls the stomach that yearns for food a "bottomless pit." He deliberately employs professional jargon-military, educational, and diplomatic-in describing the ignoble manners of peasants. The villagers who laugh at Wan-fa appear to be "performing a 'Right face!' in response to a drill sergeant" (Lau, Chinese Stories 76), and when Ah-hao and Chien make love in the muddy field, they are said to be engaging in "battles and truces." Ah-hao's unSightly posture with her hands on her hips is compared to the shape ofa "parenthesis," and as Ah-hao and Chien fight to defend themselves when suspected by Wan-fa, they seem to be at a "recitation contest" ofschool children. When Wan-fa loses his job and undergoes a period of starvation, he is said to have to "conquer" "oneeighth," "one-quarter," or "one-half" of his hunger, as if someone were measuring his appetite with mathematical precision. Finally, Ah-hao's carefully enunciated sentences are compared to those found in a "diplomatiC communique." Such language, clearly alluding to respectable middle-class life in civil society, belongs collectively to the entire community oflanguage users, in particular the middle-class, educated readers of this story. Therefore, when readers laugh with the narrator at the characters, they soon find themselves sharing the class snobbery and mean-spirited perverSity of the narrator. Through the device of eliciting "ambivalent laughter," the author has intended to criticize his readers by first involving them through their sociolinguistic consciousness. Narrative voice is conSiderably less sophisticated in "Young Master Gets His Tonic," in which the reader qUickly learns to reverse the meaning of every word the young master has uttered to decode the author's message. Many of the author's views about China's problems and the world economy are conveyed directly through the mouthpieces of the young master's cousin and another old man in the Village. Oppressed, poor peasants in

73 Appropriations of Literary Modernism

Wu Tsu-hsiang's stories, moreover, are so positively portrayed that they easily earn sympathy. The wet nurse and her family, all decent, honest, and hard-working, are compared by the author with such animals as cows and buffaloes; the woman's breasts are likened to such agricultural products as "pumpkins"; the blue veins on her breast are "rivers on the map," making her a symbol of China. Wang Chen-ho, however, has succeeded in communicating a more complicated message through his narrator; although his characters are considered despicable by ordinary middle-class readers, that very audience is implicated in these people's misery. Besides, filthy, smelly, and ignorant as they are, these unfortunate people deserve sympathy simply because they share with all other human beings the basic need for food and they have hearts capable offeeling the pain of humility. In this sense, therefore, Wang is more ofa humanitarian than many authors ofproletarian literature. Wang continued to develop his special narrative technique to express his humanitarian social vision. The tour-de-force of Rose, Rose, I Love You lies precisely in the juxtaposition of different social languages-Tung Ssu-wen's pseudointellectual rhetoric, the pimps' low-class obscenities, the prostitute's naive way of talking-so that the interplay of different verbal-ideological groups is intensively dramatized.

Culminations of the Aesthetic Tendency The Modernists' self-consciousness about form, manifested in extreme ways, reflects a skepticism toward language and the relation of form and content. The prolonged, undaunted efforts of Wang Wen-hsing to test "the limits ofthe fictional form and the functions ofthe fictional language" (Lee, "Beyond Realism" 74), for example, can only be justified in terms oftheoretical precepts of the modernist aesthetic. Although Wang has created a patently self-referential novelistic discourse, the main import of Wang's literary project as a whole is conceived as the expression of a moral vision, a subject that will be addressed in Chapter 4. It is only in the work ofa younger Modernist, Li Yung-p'ing, that one finds the absolute domination of aesthetic concerns. Li's highly acclaimed story series Chronicle of Chi-ling brought the aesthetic tendency in Taiwan's Modernist fiction to a new height. I ?

74 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

The Aesthetic Views of Wang Wen-hsing Wang Wen-hsing is convinced that "everything a literary work has to say must always be said through language." He has advised his readers to "simply look at the language [of his works] and nothing else." 18 From his academic training in New Criticism, Wang has obtained a firm belief in the formalist idea that literary effect is best attained through a process of "deautomatization," or "dehabitualization." He therefore has strived, with indomitable spirit, to put these formalist prinCiples into actual practice-to create a fictional language that possesses the utmost power to estrange. The result is inevitably a highly self-referential style that calls so much attention to itself ,~hat one suspects it may detract from the intended effect of refreshing the ~reader's perception of the represented objects. The follOWing discussion, however, is neither an analysis nor an evaluation of the linguistic attributes of Wang's style and their effectiveness, since this subject has already been addressed by several competent critics (Chang Han-liang; au-yang, "Lun Chia-pien"; Cheng Heng-hsiung; Gunn, "Process"). Instead, it will focus on the aesthetic conceptions behind Wang's experiment in language. Over the past ten years, Wang has offered several explanations of his stylistic practice on public and private occasions. Without being full-fledged theories, these explanations represent thoughtfully conceived, systematically formulated aesthetic views, which are rarely found in modern Chinese literary history. What significantly distinguishes Wang Wen-hsing's literary experiment from that of other Modernist writers, such as Wang Chen-ho, is its rigorous professionalism. Whereas Wang Chen-ho spontaneously dabbles, sometimes superficially, in different aspects of narrative form, Wang Wen-hsing has concentrated on developing a literary "idiolect" and is apparently convinced that this task requires the same hard work and self-discipline as the training of a good musician or painter. Simply counting the years he has spent writing his two novels Family Crisis (from 1965 to 1972) and Backed Against the Sea (from 1972 to 1981 on the first part, which has been published, and from 1981 to the present on the sequel) reveals that for well over twenty-five years he has been engaged in the daily travail ofthis Herculean enterprise.19 Technically speaking, Wang's experiment consists mainly ofsyntactical and lexical modifications that foreground certain auditory or visual qualities of the language. But what exactly constitutes his aesthetic vision, and how

75 Appropriations of Literary Modernism

would one characterize the ideal effect he is striving to achieve? Further, where has he derived the model for his aesthetic language, and by what criteria would he judge its successful attainment? In a personal interview in 1982, I asked Wang why sentences in his autobiographical novel Family Crisis become increasingly longer, clumsier, and more convoluted as the story proceeds. Wang replied that he envisions a consonance between the style of the narrative discourse and the general "mood" of the story. Therefore, as the inner world of the hero gradually enters a state of turmoil, the speech of the narrator also becomes more and more entangled. Wang added that since the narrator is an "arbitrary" construction of the author, the author naturally enjoys absolute power to determine which style is used.20 Wang shares the attitude toward language that has characterized much novelistic experimentation in this century, that is, a heightened awareneSs of the arbitrary nature of language as a symbolic form. By treating language in terms of its material qualities-in addition to lexicon, prosody, and syntax, the ideographic quality of the Chinese written language lends itself to further manipulations ofpsychovisual effect-in order to explore its artistic potential, Wang widens, in a sense, the space between language and its referents. This approach easily jeopardizes the basic mimetic function offictional language as conventionally understood, a not uncommon phenomenon in late modernism. However, the radicalness of Wang's experiment pales beside the more radically antirealistic practices in the West, as his novelistic discourse only departs from the realistic convention by a small breach ofthe principle of mimetic representation. The less than radical violation of the realistic rules, however, works against him in some ways. For example, his departure from conventional practice at times seems blatantly awkward: as a consequence of his linguistic maneuvers, his characters all seem to share the same set of idiosyncratiC linguistic habits, such as preferences for long sentences, certain types ofrepetition, and excessive punctuation. When the narrator in Family Crisis begins to use convoluted, entangled sentences, both the hero and the hero's brother also speak in the same manner, inevitably upsetting the reader's presumption that their speech is represented realistically. Wang, however, is apparently not bothered by this flaw; for him, the redeeming virtue of such language lies in its specially conceived "vividness."

76 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

He claims that his language use does not follow the realistic principles in a superficial sense. Rather, it is intended to capture the subtle essence of speech manners with its peculiar accents. Language in fiction must be artistically reformulated and, to borrow a traditional Chinese critical notion, must strive at shen-ssu, a likeness in spirit or essence, rather than hsing-ssu, a likeness in form. 21 He even coins the term "trans-mimetic" to convey his idea of a "heightened" sense of lifelikeness, which constitutes for him a "higher mode" of realism. It is in this sense that he expects his language to be appreciated for its "fluency" and "precision." 22 As a professor of English literature, Wang is apparently very familiar with the history of realistic fiction in the West. Many conventions of realistic fiction have gone through cycles of being perfected, naturalized, and subsequently parodied, and the world has long seen literary genres whose main import is precisely to undermine such conventions. While Wang undoubtedly sees himself as a realistic writer in the global tradition, he cannot but be aware of the current state of realism. As a latecomer, he is nevertheless determined to bring renewed Vitality to a heavily worn-out form. Therefore, on the one hand, he has chosen not to subvert or parody the process ofwriting as some Western postmodernists have done, but rather to stay within the familiar terrain ofrealism. On the other hand, inspired by more avant-garde currents in contemporary literature, he has taken the dissociation between signifier and Signified as a basis for his own innovative experiment. He is thus fundamentally different from the avant-garde writers in that he considers his violation of the older conventions a necessary evil in his attempt ultimately to achieve the pristine ideal of realistic fictional representation. Such a rationally conceived project, however, has some inherent problems. The older conventions of realistic fiction and the newer concepts of literary representation are apparently heading in opposite directions: one to create, the other to undercut the illusion of the real. Although this conflict seems to be resolved rationally in Wang's own mind, the resolution is undoubtedly a precarious one. For readers and critics alike, the awkwardness of Wang's innovative fictional language is undeniable. This awkwardness, in a sense, aptly reflects the plight of an original artist who is determined to take part in the modernist project half a century after its heyday. Despite the problematiC nature of Wang's language experiment, Wang's

77 Appropriations of Literary Modernism

language has a sensuous concreteness that qualifies it as superior art, an accomplishment heavily indebted to the modernist aesthetic. On different occasions, Wang has suggested that his manipulation of language takes as its model artistic forms more abstract than narrative fiction, such as music, painting, and poetry. The writer offiction has words at his disposal just as the musician has notes or the painter has colors. This analogy cannot but recall Fredric Jameson's argument that the modernist writers' treatment of language primarily in terms of its sensory data is an "impressionistic strategy," whose main function is "to derealize the content and make it available for consumption on some purely aesthetic level" (Political Unconscious 214).23 Much evidence exists to demonstrate Wang's inordinate concern with foregrounding the sensuous quality offictional language, which necessarily results in a tension between its aesthetic and communicative functions. Although the synaesthetic quality of Chinese characters is explored, it is worth pointing out that Wang tends to privilege the psychoacoustic effect. Much of Wang's aggreSSive manipulation of the ideograms, to the annoyance of many readers, involves an arbitrary use of the semantic element of certain characters for phonetiC purposes, such as replaCing the "hand" radical with the "mouth" radical to force a softer pronunciation or substituting English letters or phonetiC symbols for ideograms, which seems to have a similar effect.24 The repetitive use of particle and syntactical manipulations, at least in Wang's latest novel, Backed Against the Sea, do indeed produce a rhythmiC sound pattern that is pleasing to the ear and even, using Fredric Jameson's words, "libidinally gratifying." Wang tries to persuade his readers to free themselves from the convention of searching for the novel's meaning only in its communicative dimension. Insisting that his language is "musical," he on many occasions urges the reader to read his prose as if it were poetry and to pay attention not only to the "sense" but also to the "sound." To demonstrate that the real essence of his fictional language rests in its sonorous quality, he sometimes recites passages from his works at critical seminars.2S In his preface to the Hung-fan edition of Family Crisis, Wang compares the act of reading to that of listening to classical music, cleverly arguing that just as you cannot rush over a four-movement concerto in ten minutes, so the reading must also be done over a speCific length oftime. He even suggests that in order to take heed of

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every nuance, including the punctuation marks, the ideal speed of reading a literary work is one thousand Chinese characters (roughly seven hundred English words) per hour, two hours per day. Marxist criticism has argued that the modernist aesthetic strategy is ultimately related to the capitalist process of reification and to the artist's attempt to resist standardization in industrialized society.26 It may be argued that when Wang Wen-hsing launched his career, the stage of Taiwan's capitalist development roughly corresponded to that of late-nineteenth-century Europe. Chinese artists were naturally attracted to the early modernists in the West, who experienced similar kinds ofstructural changes in daily life in an increasingly fragmented, quantified modern world. It is therefore unsurprising that, although Wang has occasionally made attempts to educate and sensitize his audience, he is ineVitably aware of the futility of such efforts. As a matter offact, Wang has always been conscious ofthe incongruity of his elitist literary project with Taiwan's highly commercialized cultural environment. He has said that he did not expect the novel Family Crisis to be Widely read-he had originally planned to photocopy the manuscript to circulate among a small selected group. However, in perhaps another sign ofthe inherently utopian nature ofthe modernist project, Wang also idealistically craves something that seems impOSSible: he says he has an irresistible yearning to produce a "popular" work in a popular language with Hemingway-like "liveliness," although he would insist on reaching that goal by follOWing the same path that he has until now been taking. Such an almost religiOUS beliefin the ideal style is reminiscent of the Ie mot juste prinCiple of Flaubert and ofmany Western modernist writers' dedication to language in this century. The irony of the situation, however, is that, as a result of the rapid development of a consumer culture in Taiwan, the "Modernist" literary period has been extremely brief Even before serious artists have had time to publish their mature works, the society surrounding them has already rushed forward to a full-blown mass culture that tends to nullify the very basic assumptions of the Modernist project. The public attention that Family Crisis has attracted largely resulted from its iconoclastic content rather than its innovative style. Some cynical commentators have even attributed the surpriSingly warm reception of this book to the successful publiCity strategy of the editors of Chung-Wai wen-hsiieh [Chung-Wai

79 Appropriations of Literary Modernism

literary monthly] in which the novel was serialized. As the fervor over Family Crisis soon subsided, the gap between Wang and popular readers has become ever wider. Until now I have been treating Wang's language program largely in terms of its modernist characteristics as defined in the Western sense. However, even in such a brief modernist moment in postwar Taiwan, a Chinese version of modernist literature can never be a mere duplication of its Western models. Wang Wen-hsing's roundabout journey from an absolute embrace of Western artistic models to the deep contemplation of elements from traditional Chinese culture best proves this point. In a short essay of 1987, "Wu hsiu-chih te chan-cheng" [A never-ending battle]" (104-1°5), Wang states that when he was twenty years old, he was once suddenly struck by the realization that his own language was not in any way different from that of any other people. He was then reading Flaubert, Maupassant, and Tolstoy, and he could hear in their works a cadence, a rhythm, like that of a bass orchestra. There was no such music, however, in his own language-it was shamefully "immature, hasty, and flustered." It was not until two years later, when he came across the work of Hemingway, which to his mind was an ideal mixture ofmusicality and simple vividness, that he plunged into a lifelong struggle with fictional language. He was able to write only a few words a day, and in order not to write too fast, he deliberately wrote from left to right rather than from top to bottom. He revised every sentence more than ten times. Wang admitted that it might seem odd that he has taken Hemingway as his model, as the latter's characteristic simpliCity is so drastically different from Wang's own style. Yet he is convinced that there is such a thing as a "resemblance in spirit (shen) and a dissimilarity in form (hsing)," as stated in a traditional Chinese critical epithet. Although the initial inspiration for Wang's aesthetic views apparently comes from foreign literature, as Wang probed into the deeper recesses of aesthetic questions, he seems to have turned to traditional Chinese artistic and ethical concepts for theoretical support. The critical term shen is a key word used by the "metaphYSical school" of Chinese theory of literature, as James J. Y. Liu defines it, the philosophical foundation of which consists of Taoist philosophy and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism.27 When Wang declared that he had been striving to emulate the sound pattern of the classical Chinese

80 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

language, its i-yang tun-ts'o (modulation and rhythm), he seemed to be endorsing ideas advocated by the "technical school" of the Ch'ing dynasty.28 Most interestingly, Wang's ideas toward the end of "A Never-ending Battle" seem to suggest a return to the time-honored moralist tradition of Chinese literature. There Wang describes his struggle with language as governed by a prinCiple of "sincerity" and supports this notion with the Confucian motto hsiu-t'su li ch'i ch'eng (rhetorical, or stylistic, practice must be based on sincerity or honesty). In a sense, both the doctrines ofWestern realist literature and traditional Chinese ethics stress the importance of truthfulness to experience, or ch'eng. By perceiving his stylistic practice in moral terms and by returning to subjective ethical experience, Wang seems to have found a new anchor for his seriously conceived lifelong literary project.

An Exemplary Modernist Aesthetic Work: Chronicle of Chi-ling A modernist tendency that universally offends public taste and unfailingly incurs censorship from the authorities and gut-level disapproval from conservatives is what is known as "striving for sensations," described by Irving Howe in the follOWing words: The modernist writer strives for sensations, in the serious sense of the term; his epigone, in the frivolous sense. The modernist writer thinks ofsubject matter not as something to be rehearsed or recaptured but to be conquered and enlarged.... He becomes entranced with depthswhichever you choose: the depths of the city, or the self, or the underground, or the slums, or the extremes of sensation induced by sex, liquor, drugs. (31) It is apparently not coincidental that all important Modernist works published in Taiwan in the 198os-Wang Wen-hsing's Backed Against the Sea in 1981, Pai Hsien-yung's Crystal Boys in 1983, Li Ang's Sha-fu [The butcher's wife] in 1983, Wang Chen-ho's Rose, Rose, I Love You in 1984, and Li Yung-p'ing's Chronicle of Chi-ling in 1986-display this tendency in a conspiCUOUS way: In Backed Against the Sea, the antihero's erotic imagination has made him a victim of an overly potent prostitute, turning an ordinary prostitution scene into a pageantry ofsadism. The vivid rendering of the slaughterhouse pig killing in The Butcher's Wife and the butcher's physical and psychological abuse of

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his wife at home reinforce each other, forming the basic tenor of a story about sexual brutality and vengeful murder. In Crystal Boys, along with frequent evocations ofan atmosphere offestivity, two kinds ofphysical desire, hunger for sex and the basic need for food, are mentioned with equal frequency, with the apparent thematic implication ofglorifying the body. This idealizing tendency, evident in the sometimes florid discourse, is undercut, however, by the sordidness of sensuous detail, particularly regarding bodily fluids-blood, sweat, tears, and saliva-whether caused by Taiwan's semitropical weather, sexual activities, or human brutality. Lower bodily functions are the primary source for carnivalesque laughter in Rose, Rose I Love You-the protagonist farts whenever he opens his mouth to preach. However, none of these works is comparable, in aesthetic intensity, to Chronicle of Chi-ling, a work that transfixes with a sinister atmosphere of violence and blasphemy and contains excrUCiatingly sensational descriptions of murder, animal killing, and sex. Although the Modernists typically downplay the historical speCifiCity of their works, the writers of most of the above-mentioned novels have intended to use what Bakhtin calls the "underworld naturalism" as a means to communicate some kind of social message (Problems 94). Whereas Wang Chen-ho's Rose, Rose I Love You can be readily classified as a political satire cast in a parodiC mode, the first three, more symbolic works also subordinate sensational depictions to themes clearly conceived to comment on existing social or ethical practices. Their candid treatment of such social ills as violence in the family, prostitution, blue- and white-collar criminality, and, above all, poverty unmistakably points to real problems in contemporary Taiwan. However, the subversive edge of these works comes not so much from their authors' penetrating SOCiological inSights as from the assault implied in their sensational subject matter on the sense of propriety of ordinary readers. Backed Against the Sea, when serialized in the literary supplement of China Times, had to be discontinued because of pressure from offended readers; controversy surrounded The Butcher's Wife, in large part because the expliCit depictions ofsex were written by an unmarried woman; Crystal Boys had to be transformed into a melodramatic film before the public would pay any attention to it. Ironically enough, Chronicle of Chi-ling, by far the most sensational work among them, has not caused any controversy. Perhaps it is precisely be-

82 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

cause the work is completely devoid of any ideological relevance-or, one may say that the only ideology behind Li's detailed, amoral depiction of morally transgressive behaviors is the "ideology ofthe aesthetic"-and is so obviously concerned with eliciting "disinterested" aesthetic pleasures that readers ofthe work have been prescreened. As the work provides few entry points for readers who are likely to misinterpret its theme, those who actually read it tend to be predisposed to appreciate its aesthetic quality. That may be the reason why the few critical reviews it has so far received are all favorable. Chronicle of Chi-ling is not a novel in the conventional sense but a story series revolving around a criminal event that took place some time before the beginning of the book. A local scoundrel, Sun Ssu-fang, with the assistance offour teenage hoods, rapes and causes the suicide ofCh'ang-sheng, the wife of a coffin maker, Liu Lao-shih, on a night when the townsfolk are celebrating the birthday of the Kuan-yin Bodhisattva. The next day, Liu Lao-shih kills the wife and mistress of Sun and is arrested. From that time, residents of Chi-ling, all of them in some sense accomplices to the crime, are haunted by guilt and uneasily anticipate revenge from Liu on those more immediately involved in the rape. The redreSSing of the wrong, however, takes a convoluted path, which is not even fully unfolded when the story series ends. The book's themes are conspicuously "amoral." The long-awaited revenge on the four boys is deliberately detained. When Liu Lao-shih avenges his wife's death, he does not kill the rapist Sun Ssu-fang, but Sun's wife and his mistress Ch'un-hung-the latter dies in front of her five-year-old son, who becomes mentally incompetent as a result of his trauma. Or, if one follows critic Lung Ying-t'ai's explication of the plot and takes the family of four murdered on the river in the story "Ta shui" [Great flood] to be Yen-niang's family-her husband being one of the four hoods that have assisted Sun Ssu-fang in the rape, as we have learned from the other two stories "Ssunien" [Missing] and "Man-t'ien hua-yii" [A sky full of flower-rain] ("Yi-ko" 167-168)-the irony offate is nearly complete, since Yen-niang's husband is the only one out of the four who shows signs of repentance. As every act ofrevenge ineVitably involves the innocent, moral transgression also seems to reproduce itself. The world is presented as an unjust existentialist hell

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where t'ien-li, or heavenly justice, exists only in people's minds, constantly alluded to but forever receding from the characters' grasp. In Wang Chen-ho's and Wang Wen-hsing's fiction, characters are often victims of blind sociological forces, and the authors' deliberate emphasis on their despicable qualities is a literary strategy aimed to test the reader's capacity for compassion. As aesthetic concerns dominate in Chronicle of Chiling, moral transgression is constantly used to elicit sensations of fear and exhilaration rather than moral self-reflection or humanitarian feelings. For example, in the episode "Hao i-p'ien ch'un-yii" [What a nice spring rain], the author's insinuation that Ch'iu-t'ang, an innocent young girl who is probably later raped and sold into prostitution by a villain, is sexually attracted to the "tough guy" criminal suspect, gives an ambivalent touch to the reader's concern for Ch'iu-t'ang's fate (206). Similarly, in the story "jih-t'ou yii" [The rain from the sun], Hsiao Lo's killing of the dog is depicted in such minute detail that the reader vicariously takes pleasure in the ruthless brutality. If the reader seldom finds it easy to sympathize with Li's characters in moral terms, he or she is frequently invited to empathize with them in sensuous terms as a result of Li's superlative skill in creating tension and immediacy, building a compelling illusion ofthe "real." Much ofthe power of his narrative comes from the brilliant execution oftechniques revolving around "impersonal narration." Indeed, Li has brought to near perfection the ideal narrative type aspired to by the formalist group ofthe Modernists. The narration in such stories in the series as "The Rain from the Sun," a story that won first prize in the 1979 United Daily News short story contest, and "Wan-fu hsiang li" [In the Wan-fu alley], purporting to be untouched transcripts of characters' behavior, best exemplifies the ideal of minimally mediated narrative representation. Because the narrator strictly denies himself the power of free mental access, the narrative in these stories is composed largely of meticulous descriptions of overtly visible phYSical actions and recorded speech. The control of perception is exceedingly rigorous. Important settings, such as the crimson sun on the horizon and the recurring image of the kuan-yin Bodhisattva at the carnival, find their way onto the scene in an inconspicuous manner, by "inCidentally" coming into the view of a certain character. As a result, there are many tags that indicate the characters' outwardly discernible perceptions in such phrases as "he saw,"

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or "he gazed at." The narrative act, therefore, is modeled on the workings of the stenographer and the camera-Seymour Chatman's analogy~and the discourse type approaches the pole of "pure mimesis." As the "nonnarrated representation" discourse type deliberately blocks all conventional channels of direct communication between narrator and readers, the readers of Chronicle frequently find themselves relegated to the role ofspectators in a spellbound world. As readers are constantly presented with a composite of visual images, uninterpreted actions, and unremitting suspense, floods of sensation are evoked but not always relieved. The story "The Rain from the Sun" provides an excellent example of how tension is built and finally relieved-but not in a conventional way. Much of the space of "The Rain from the Sun" is devoted to meticulous, vivid descriptions of how Hsiao Lo, one ofthe four scamps, kills and skins a female dog on a pOisonously hot afternoon. Feeling nauseous all the while, Hsiao Lo apparently is affected by the rumor that someone resembling Liu Lao-shih has suddenly appeared under the chinaberry tree somewhere in the town, presumably seeking revenge. After a great amount of tension building, the ending seems anticlimactic: Hsiao Lo finally walks over to the chinaberry tree and confronts the avenger, but the man, who is never actually identified as such, simply departs without a word. The highly equivocal ending is nevertheless given a strong sense of closure through a symbolic shower of rain that suddenly falls as the mysterious visitor takes his leave. By dispelling the unbearable heat that is repeatedly mentioned in the text, the rain also significantly relieves the compelling anxiety of Hsiao Lo and the townsfolk, cleansing their guilt-ridden consciences. It also, to a certain extent, soothes the anxieties ofreaders, even while leaving them with unresolved suspense on the level of the plot. The book's aesthetic treatment of animalistic gratification, violence, sacrilege, fear ofretribution, and aspiration for grace may be seen as producing therapeutic and cathartic effect on its readers. Critics such as Yii Kuangchung, Joseph Lau, and Chu Yen, all in one way or another interpreted the work as a moral fable, a story of crime and punishment about a community that has collectively sinned (Yii Kuang-chung, "Shih-erh"; Lau, "Tropics"; Chu Yen). Yii Kuang-chung further suggests that, in addition to dealing with the most basic, instinctive human desires and emotions, the work at the same time offers insight into the deep recesses of the Chinese psyche. This

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comment surely touches on a most important source from which the work's aesthetic effects are derived. Whereas the early "avant-garde" writers of the Modernist literary movement explored occidental exoticism to give expression to their romantic fantasies, Li, writing in a post-Nativist decade, has exoticized "native" Chinese regional features for a well-conceived aesthetic project. His sense of nativism, unlike that ofChu Hsi-ning and the Taiwanese regional writers, is derived from his memory ofethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, if not specifically from Sarawak, where he spent his childhood. Although critics have suggested that the setting of Chronicle of Chi-ling may be loosely identified as somewhere on the Chinese mainland in the early twentieth century, there are no sufficiently realistic references in the book to support or refute this suggestion. As a matter of fact, the composite image of old China does not depend on historical identity but is largely a textual product: the language is deliberately adapted from traditional Chinese vernacular fiction; character names, physical landscape, and customs may have specific models but are obViously re-created to evoke viVidly the unique ambience of Chinese small-town life before the "modern" period. The fictional world in the stories is therefore at once realistic and fantastic, familiar and strange, in some ways reminiscent ofthe semilegendary outlaw community in such traditional novels as Shui-hu chuan [The water margin]. One element ofthe antiquated worldview of such a community, namely, the fatalist folk belief in yiian (fated interpersonal relationship) and nieh (cyclical retribution), both derived from vulgarized Buddhist concepts, is explored and used as a baseline for the plot of the story. As Yii Kuang-chung points out, the traditional Chinese moral system ranks yin (licentiousness and its worse manifestation in adultery) as the utmost evil and the source of all kinds of wrongdoings. Sun Ssu-fang's rape of Ch'angsheng in front ofthe image ofthe bodhisattva thus plants an evil seed of nieh, as he violates both human and sacred law. The violation is even more atrocious as Ch'ang-sheng is the symbol of chastity-she has never conceived a child-and is in many ways presented as the double-image of the bodhisattva. As the evil seed grows, it is bound to incur a chain of other niehcriminal acts and retributions that would not only involve the violator himself, but also his family, descendants, and other innocent people as well. While the punitive aspect of the Chinese folk belief in nieh has the same

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effect on individual conscience as the Christian notion of divine judgment, the macabre arbitrariness with which nieh unfolds reflects a more primitive, irrational fear of the uncontrollable chance element in life. By tapping such a dark corner of the Chinese subconscious and evoking both eerie feelings and an instinctive awe for the uncanny, Li has proven to be more successful than earlier Modernist writers in his realization of the modernist aesthetic with Chinese resources. The unique structure ofLi's work also deserves special comment. Without distinctive thematic lines, many of the stories in the series, when isolated, have the appearance offragmentary sketches. Li's tour-de-force, in fact, rests precisely in gathering them into a series, yoking them into an integral whole, so that he can ingeniously explore the rich potential of its text syntax. As the stories' central characters and their perspectives differ, the core event is focused and refocused from different angles, and its different phases are illuminated to varying degrees. Each time the murder is mentioned, it is recontextualized within a new sphere of reality, which reverberates with a number of other such spheres in the series that have been "stored" in the story's memory. As individual stories tangentially intersect, one character's fate becomes "entangled" with another's, and open-ended episodes forever anticipate new stories. Therefore, theoretically speaking, the story series may proliferate without limit, although momentarily the narrative merely focuses on what is covered by the spotlight. The overall effect, then, is that, instead of forming a closed semantic system, the final emergence of a hidden signified-something that would imbue the story with moral relevance-in the endlessly extendable story series is forever delayed. Compared with such a story as Ou-yang Tzu's "As the Dusk Approaches," which also involves multiple presentations of the same incident, Li's approach to the epistemological problem seems very different. Instead of affirming the objective existence ofa "truth" while doubting its acceSSibility to individual consciousness, Li seems to be building the aesthetic effect precisely on the indeterminacy ofthe situation, on the notion that, given the limits ofhuman cognition, the"objective reality" will never emerge with a distinct contour and clearly delimited circumscriptions. As Bradbury and McFarlane once suggested, on recognizing the primary epistemological difficulty, the modernists set out "to redeem, essentially or existentially, the formless universe ofcontingency" through art (50). Instead of imposing "form" on the chaotic

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materials oflife, Li has taken "contingency" itself-the underlying principle ofthe notions ofyuan and nieh-as the very organizing principle of his book. While the syntax ofthe text ofChronicle of Chi-ling points to a new aesthetic mode-the postmodernist?-the narrative method employed in presenting individual episodes undoubtedly achieves the very ideal strived for by the Modernists. The two features combined thus create the unique quality of the "hyper real": with all its semblance of veracity at a local level, the fictional world as a whole is nevertheless clearly an imaginary verbal construct, deliberately situated in a temporal and spatial void. By purposefully undermining the notion ofrealistic representation ofsome "objective reality" and by shaping a highly effective aesthetic discourse, Li is, more self-consciously than any other Modernist, trying to create a text that is self-referential rather than referential. It is probably in this sense that one can wholeheartedly endorse Joseph Lau's remark that ranks Li among the few significant writers, including Lu Hsiin, Eileen Chang, and Pai Hsien-yung, who have contributed to "expanding the horizon ofmodern Chinese narrative" ("Tropics" 6). Further, as the artistic potential of a number of techniques introduced by the Modernists are explored to the fullest extent in Li's work, Chronicle of Chi-ling may also be regarded as representing a culminating point in the Modernist project ofpost-I949 Taiwan.

CHAPTER FOUR

Modernists Reaching Maturity: Cultural Critique and Textual Strategies In this chapter I will discuss four major Modernist works of fiction from Taiwan: Tales of Taipei Characters and Crystal Boys by Pai Hsien-yung; and Family Crisis and Backed Against the Sea by Wang Wen-hsing. My aim is not only to identify the specific ways in which these works embody certain strands of the Western modernist aesthetic, but also to demonstrate that as Taiwan's Modernists matured in their artistry, their capacity to incorporate native literary traditions and comment on contemporary social reality also grew impressively, resulting in some monumental contributions to modern Chinese literary history. Since the first work to be dealt with, Pai Hsien-yung's Tales of Taipei Characters,l has already been thoroughly analyzed in several excellent critical studies by such critics as Ou-yang Tzu, Joseph Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Yen Yuan-shu, my examination will concentrate on one specific feature: the work's indebtedness to traditional Chinese views in terms of thematic conception and ideological outlook.

Tales of Taipei Characters Though primarily concerned with the younger writers of the 1960s, Joseph Lau's "The Concepts ofTime and Reality in Modern Chinese Fiction" identifies a prominent feature of Taiwan literature written in the two decades immediately following the Retreat: the repression of historical representation. Because writings on sensitive topiCS were easily banned and their authors blacklisted during this period, voluntary or involuntary self-censorship has

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produced a literature in which contemporary history is strikingly underrepresented. This feature stands out conspicuously in comparison with literature of the pre-1949 period, when Chinese writers displayed an "obsessive concern with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease" (Hsia, "AppendiX I" 533). Although writers of the older generation inherited the pre- 1949 realist tradition of Chinese New Literature, their deliberate avoidance of "critical realism," consciously or unconSCiously altering the very conventions ofthis tradition, was largely an effect of the dominant culture's ideological prescriptions. Most of the younger Modernists, however, did not subscribe to the same ideology. Although they inevitably felt the same kinds ofpressure, the downplay of historical references in their works was more aesthetically than politically motivated. Not only was tendentiousness remarkably absent in their literature, but the conception of "history" itselfwas also different. As Lau observed, almost all the young Modernists had tried writing "moral parables," and "in the hands ofthese parable writers ... modern Chinese fiction has branched offfrom the central tradition: instead ofthe naturalistic 'mansocial history,' they are now writing what John Henry Raleigh has called the 'ego-universal history'" (32). Even though the really obscure parable writings qUickly went out of fashion and the Modernists soon began to take up the subject of contemporary history, Lau's observation remains valid, as such Modernist works usually clainled to be part of universal human history. Pai Hsien-yung's Tales of Taipei Characters prOVides an excellent example of this tendency. Addressing the ostrich mentality of Taipei's mainlander emigres in the 1960s, Tales first appeared as a welcome exception to the general lack of historical references in Taiwan's Modernist fiction. C. T. Hsia, for example, commended the work as virtually o:ffering an allegory of the history of the Republic of China ("Pai" 294). Joseph Lau saw in characters of this book "the collective consciousness ofChinese exiles in general" ("Celestials" 410). Yen Yuan-shu also praised Pai for his "strong historical consciousness," even though his own criticism of the book primarily focused on its technical aspect. Furthermore, when leftist critics castigated Pai for his "reactionary" attempt to whitewash the crimes ofa decadent social class closely associated with the Nationalists, calling him "a cosmetician for funeral homes," they expressed their concern with the work's historical implications. Neverthe-

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less, from the specific vantage point taken in the present study, the kind of historical representation found in Tales conceals an aesthetic strategy that purports to rewrite history in ahistorical, universal terms. au-yang Tzu has most fully expounded the universalist nature ofthe work in her Wang-Hsieh fang ch'ien te yen-tzu [Swallows in front ofthe noble mansions of Wang and Hsieh], a critical study devoted to exegesis of Pai's Tales. Stressing the work's multilayered semantic structure-a feature that may plausibly be seen as haVing developed from the parabolic writings' allegorical tendency discussed by Joseph Lau-Ou-yang argues that the tales are primarily concerned with universal human struggle, with the gap between past and present, the conflict between soul and flesh, and the unresolvable riddle of life and death. Although she identifies the diViding line between Pai's "past" and "present" to be the year 1949, with speCific historical reference to the Nationalist Retreat (9), her interpretation of the past-present theme is primarily conceived in universal rather than historical terms. Within the book's particular symbolic system, she argues, the "past" is not merely a temporal reference, but stands for a set of psychological values; an illusion of plenitude plays a crucial role in the characters' involvement in "the eternal battle between soul and flesh." 2 Following this line of thinking, even though the central subject of Tales is contemporary Chinese history, it is so in a highly generalized, symbolic way. Ou-yang's analysis is particularly valuable as it makes evident some fundamental assumptions that au-yang shares with her former classmate Pai Hsien-yung as, in general terms, both of them have positioned themselves in the Western liberal-humanist tradition. Despite his reputation as Taiwan's leading Modernist fiction writer, Pai has been moderate in his appropriation of pure aesthetic modernism. Whereas modernist skeptiCism about the referential quality of literature and the view ofthe literary text as essentially self-referential are clearly pronounced in the aesthetic views of such Modernists as Wang Wen-hsing and Li Yung-p'ing, Pai's publicly expressed opinions about literature, espeCially in regard to the hierarchy of form and content, remain largely within the broad humanist tradition and lack a speCific emphaSiS on the autonomous status of language as an independent verbal reality. (For example, his advocacy of artistic autonomy in the past has always placed more emphaSiS on the importance offreeing modern Chinese literature from political interference.) Still more important, Pai has proven to be more Willing as well as more successful in

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assimilating traditional Chinese literary elements in his work than any of his peers.3 His intricate textual allusions, political allegories, and the strategies he employs to skirt explicit political criticism all seem to be inspired by traditional Chinese literary practices. The central themes of both of his major works, too, are pregnant with references to long-standing Chinese literati traditions as well as to the legacy of Chinese gentry ideology. In Tales, such elements are most visible in the stories' treatment of the relationship between history and culture, public and private.

Culture versus History The wild grass and flowers on the side ofthe Vermilion-Sparrow Bridge, The slanting sun setting at the edge ofthe Black-Swallow AlleyBirds that in old times frequented the mandarin halls ofthe noble clans of Wang and Hsieh, Are now plunging into the humble residences of plebians of a hundred clans. Liu Yii-hsi (772-842, T'ang dynasty), "Wu-i hsiang" [Black-Swallow Alley] The lament of transience and mutability, the theme of this classical poem cited on the title page of Tales, is perhaps the most persistent and most widely employed thematic paradigrn in traditional Chinese poetry. Besides setting the tenor for the emotional ambience of the book, the poem, with references to the rise and fall of the Six Dynasties and the decline of illustrious noble clans,. evokes a time-honored paradox of the relationship between history and culture: Although the Six Dynasties was a historical period marked by political turmoil and weakened central governments under menacing northern barbarians, it is also a period known for its extraordinary cultural vitality and artistic achievements. The poet's express admiration for the beauty and splendor of the cultural monuments produced in a time when national existence was endangered goes against the Confucian moral prescription that associates excessive attention to artistic refinement with the individual citizen's neglect of r€~sponsibilitytoward the state.4 This inherently ambivalent view ofthe relationships between culture and polities and between art and history features prominently in Pai's privately

92 Modernism and the Nativist Resistance

and publicly expressed opinions but is only insinuated within the textual space of Tales, where the implied author ostensibly abstains from explicit moral judgment in accordance with the objectivity principle. This technique is best illustrated by the most celebrated story in the series, "Yu-yiian ching-meng" [Wandering in the garden, waking from a dream] (1966). That in this story traditional China is symbolically represented by a group ofk'unch'u singers at the Fu-tzu miao (Confucian temple), a public entertainment quarter located in Nanking, the Republican period capital, points to the intimate and by no means innocent relationship between decadence and cultural refinement,S as the situation immediately calls to mind, for culturally informed readers, two famous poetic lines traditionally used to condemn those who fail to take proper patriotic action: "Shang-nu pu chih wang-kuo hen, ko chiang yu ch'ang Hou-t'ing hua" (Across the river, the singsong girls, ignorant of the fact that their country has already been overtaken by the enemy, are still singing the decadent love song "Blossoms in the Backyard").6 Despite the apparent neutral stance taken by the story's narrator, impliCit moral judgment is still made, if obliquely. In describing the pompous lifestyle led by Nationalist army generals and their wives, for example, the narrator allows a glimpse of the underside of this glory by telling how, for a sumptuous party ofMme. Ch'ien, "tons ofsilver dollars had been sinfully spent" (my italics). With one intrusive adverb, the entire historical milieuthe extreme disorder, calamities, and hardships of ordinary people in the late 194os-begins to loom in the background. Thus, the lack of moral judgment from the sociohistorical point of view in Pai's work is a deliberate "suppression" rather than political blindness. Moreover, perhaps the most prominent strategy used to bracket off such judgments is Pai's dedication of the book to "the generation of my parents, who lived in a time full of grief and disasters." History is thus deliberately presented as sieved through subjective consciousness and treated only in terms of its impact on the individual life. This conversion from the public to the private, from the objective to the subjective, again, is a distinguishing feature ofthe genre stylistics ofChinese literati literature, in which scholarofficials give free vent to their sensitive, delicate, even decadent sentiments while reserving for practical life their serious dedication to state service. To a large extent, as Ou-yang Tzu has demonstrated well, Pai is not expliCitly critical of the Confucian tradition in Tales; at times, he even seems

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to be indirectly confirming its value. Therefore, even though the book's "apolitical" references to contemporary history could be politically liablesince they are likely to trigger unsanctioned associations of subjects embarrassing for the Nationalists-the work has nevertheless been well accepted within Taiwan's dominant culture and comfortably consumed as history under erasure. Moreover, since the work's cultural assumptions are so highly traditional and characteristically "Chinese," the Tales has not only enjoyed unusual popularity among Taiwan readers, modernists and traditionalists alike, but has also been warmly appreciated by readers on the mainland, unaffected by the ideological differences.

Public versus Private IfPai's perception ofthe culture-history relationship shows the visible influence of the Confucianist value system, he has also unmistakably displayed discontent with certain aspects of the Confucian tradition. Though most pronounced in Crystal Boys, the conflict between public and private already appears in Tales. In order to understand this motif, some comment on Ouyang Tzu's criticism in Swallows in Front of the Noble Mansions is in order. In her interpretation of the thematic structure of Tales, au-yang has stressed the oppOSition between the spiritual and the libidinal, soul and flesh-an interpretive scheme perhaps too heavily informed by Western concepts. Because Tales was written at a time when the author himself was under similar Western influences, ()u-yang's approach is probably well justified. Nevertheless, on several occasions, au-yang, a careful and conscientious critic, has admitted that her critical scheme does not always work? One ofthese occasions is ofparticular interest: Although always inclined to stress Pai's assertion ofthe spiritual over the corporeal, au-yang has sensed that, in the story "Wandering in the Garden," Pai has clearly placed his sympathy with the corporeal aspect oflove. In order to maintain the consistency of her argument, au-yang treats this story as "a rare exception": Thus the bitter remorse of Mme. Ch'ien, that "I have lived only once," which refers to her affair with